113 Women File Lawsuit After a Birth Control Mix-Up Resulted in Unwanted Pregnancies

For birth control to be the most effective, it's important that the pills be taken in order. Now that more than 100 women have filed a lawsuit alleging that reversed pill packs led to their unwanted pregnancies, it looks like one drug company is learning this lesson the hard way.

The FDA recalled 3.2 million blister packs of Cyclafem 7/7/7 in 2011, after a Kansas City, MO, woman realized that her pills were flipped in the reverse order. But now, a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia claims that the recall wasn't enough: 113 women allegedly conceived a child due to the mix-up. The suit claims that the reversed pill packs resulted in 113 unintended pregnancies in 26 states.

According to the document, 94 women carried their babies to term, and a total of 117 women are seeking millions of dollars in damages to compensate for pain and suffering, medical costs, and the price of raising the children. A class-action lawsuit was filed in Georgia, but because only 53 packs out of the half-million returned were found to be defective, a federal judge ruled that the case couldn't move forward as class-action.

US District Judge Steve C. Jones noted that each woman's case was unique — whether she became pregnant, whether she carried the pregnancy to term, what the laws are in her state, and whether she kept the birth control packs or the receipt — and lawyers will have to build cases that reflect the individual women.

Endo Pharmaceuticals' subsidiary Qualitest Inc. manufactured the faulty packs, and the suit's lead attorney, Keith Bodoh, blames their slow response time on the irreversible problem. "When they sell the pills to the public, they're supposed to have adequate safety measures in place so that no defective products reach the shelf," he said. "But it makes it more egregious when you learn that the products were on the shelf for at least 10 months in some cases."