Expendable II

“In fact, it may well be that the incidence of infection is going to be pretty high in the patients who need the device most. Again, if we look at this from an overall, long-range view (these are the things I have never said out aloud before and I don’t know how it is going to sound), perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilisation but not lethal.”

-J. Robert Willson,

Chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University

Speaking about IUDs to the 1962 Population Council Conference