Attorney Requests Female Judge to Hear Paragard IUD Injury Lawsuits

An attorney representing a woman claiming that she was harmed by the Paragard IUD made by Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. on Thursday told the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation that cases over the birth control device should be sent to a federal judge in Atlanta in part because the judge is a woman and the litigation concerns women’s products.

“We believe that she is the best judge to get this of all proposed because she is a woman and this is a woman’s product dealing with women’s issues.,” Robert Hammers, plaintiff for the attorney, said.

The plaintiffs in the suits claim that the intrauterine devices implanted within them subsequently broke while they were being removed, causing them injury as pieces of the devices remained stuck in their uteruses. They claim Teva and Cooper Companies Inc. knew about the defect and the device’s propensity for breaking but failed to alert physicians or government regulators while overstating the benefits of the device.

“This is about attorney advertising and an uptick in that advertising promoted by movant’s counsel, not a genuine mass tort,” Teva and Cooper said in October. “It portends a model that plays out in MDLs in which cases are filed and added to the MDL not because they are meritorious, but rather because cases can easily be filed, escape individual scrutiny and artificially inflate case counts for settlement.”