Pfizer recalls birth control pills
Yahoo! News reported today that women could possibly sue the drug companies for a lot of money for becoming pregnant after taking defective birth control pills. The pills were recalled by Pfizer on February 1.
Glenn Cohen, assistant professor and co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School comments that courts have typically thought about so-called wrongful pregnancy cases as similar to medical malpractice. He goes on to say that similar cases have allowed people to sue for things such as unwanted pregnancies after botched vasectomies. In the past, there has even been a case in which a woman successfully sued a pharmacist for a pregnancy that resulted from errors in filling the woman’s birth control prescriptions, Cohen said.
The best chance for a case is for women to band together and bring a class-action lawsuit against Pfizer, said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. Class action cases could ask for considerably more money than individual cases.
Women taking the recalled products should begin taking non-hormonal birth control immediately, the company said.