Usually it's a pleasure to get a check in the mail, particularly if it's for a large and unexpected sum. But when a $2,160 check showed up recently, it just made me sad.
The money was from the Dalkon Shield Trust, a fund established in the 1980's to deal with a class-action lawsuit filed by the more than 150,000 women injured by a faulty birth-control device. Now the trust is preparing to shut down, and it is passing out the last of the money.
For me, the check marks the end of an unhappy history that began in 1971 when I was a 20-year-old college student. I'd been taking birth-control pills, but bad publicity about potential side effects made me want to check out alternatives. So I went to Planned Parenthood and asked for what was then considered the new safe option -- an intrauterine device called the Dalkon Shield.
For five years, I never had to think about birth control. Then in 1975, I had a bout of painful cramps, which, it turned out, were caused by a severe infection. My horrified gynecologist took out the IUD and prescribed large doses of antibiotics. He also warned me that I might have trouble having children.
He was right, though I didn't find out for more than a decade. I had to fall in love, get married and spend a few years trying to conceive before an X-ray showed that my fallopian tubes were scarred and completely blocked. My husband and I tried in-vitro fertilization three times but were unsuccessful in having children.
Meanwhile, the Dalkon Shield lawsuits dragged on. In 1985, the A. H. Robins Company, the manufacturer, was forced to finance a multimillion-dollar trust to deal with claims. A court-ordered newspaper advertising campaign urged women who thought they'd been injured by the Dalkon Shield to register by postcard. I sent in my postcard, and the trust then informed me that I had to present my medical records -- in my case, from four gynecologists in three different cities. I signed on with a Manhattan lawyer handling hundreds of similar cases on a contingency basis.
Years passed. My lawyer would occasionally call with bulletins. The Dalkon Shield Trust rejected my case. Good news, it agreed to review my case. Sorry again, trust officials had decided that my medical records didn't prove that the IUD caused the infection, despite my doctor's affidavit. But as a consolation prize, the trust offered me $125 to go away.
By the seventh year (or was it the eighth?), my lawyer said he didn't think my case was strong enough to take to trial and suggested I give up. Clearly, he was not eager to invest more nonbillable hours in a hopeless cause.
I had one last option: to take the case to arbitration. That would yield a maximum award of $20,000, not the $2 million settlements some others had received through lawsuits. Why not, I thought -- at least it would cost the trust more money to fight me.
Finally, in 1996, I got a hearing date. Just beforehand, my lawyer's son, a junior member of the firm, called to say that he was taking over my case -- and to warn that the Dalkon Shield Trust's staff was planning to attack my sexual history. Their strategy, he said, was to argue that because I had not led the life of a nun, I could have picked up a pelvic infection anywhere. My gynecologists' notes became the paper trail of my sexual history, dating from the early 1970's.
The 1996 hearing was ugly. As promised, the young woman who represented the trust questioned me disapprovingly about my sexual history. I could barely contain my anger: I had spent years in agony over my inability to have children, and now I, not a product that had been pulled off the market, was being blamed.
I won the arbitration. But the victory doesn't help when we look at friends with their children and wonder what our own kids would have been like.
The trust was so ruthless in dismissing cases and parsimoniously settling others that it wound up with extra cash, which it is now parceling out. We've received roughly $25,000, after lawyers' fees. But the money is too emotionally loaded to enjoy; we've used it to pay bills and taxes.
When I watched the movie "A Civil Action," I was struck when the woman who had filed a class-action suit blaming polluters for the death of her child said that she had never cared about money, that she had just wanted an apology. I feel the same way. Perhaps that's why my "victory" did not ease my sadness: paying people off means never having to say you're sorry.
Meryl Gordon is a contributing editor at New York Magazine.
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