On a Monday night in February 2019 Jan Faulkner sat down at her kitchen table with her new, work-issue laptop, a piece of paper and a list containing hundreds of women’s names. Like her, they had lost years of their lives to excruciating, even “suicidal”, pain caused by a so-called lunch-hour sterilisation device. Fitted in less than 15 minutes at GP surgeries and NHS hospitals, the device had been promoted as an easy, non-surgical birth-control method.
For Faulkner, a call-centre worker in her mid-thirties at the time, the injury caused by the Essure coil – manufactured by Bayer the pharmaceutical giant behind Alka-Selzer, Berocca and Aspirin – had left her housebound, unable to work or care for her five children and feeling as though she
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