Hundreds of Australian women who have had their lives negatively impacted by faulty mesh implants after receiving some unwelcome advice from doctors regarding their sex lives. The implants cause the women to suffer chronic and debilitating pain, including during intercourse. One of the solutions suggested to them by doctors was to try anal sex instead.
At the beginning of August an email exchange between doctors emerged as part of a federal court class action in Australia launched by victims of the faulty mesh implants. The emails revealed the insensitivity of French gynaecologists involved with Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant behind the product. The women had the devices implanted to treat common childbirth complications. But the devices are now causing them chronic pain, including during intercourse. The response from some doctors to this problem has dismayed many of the victims.
'It is no less true that sodomy could be a good alternative!' one doctor wrote.
Another discussed the difficulty of raising sexual matters with his patients: 'I said to myself, there you go, for your next prolapse [patient], you talk to her about orgasms. OK! But also about fellatio, sodomy, the clitoris with or without G-spot etc.,' he added.
These so-called solutions have caused outrage among members of the Australian Pelvic Mesh Support Group, who have classed them as despicable and demoralising. Some of the women said they had encountered similar attitudes from their own doctors. 'Our vaginas have been abused by mesh and now doctors are suggesting our anus be abused. Despicable! Only a misogynist could think this way,' one woman told the Guardian.
Rachel Siewert, a Greens senator who is chairing the senate inquiry into the devices, described the treatment of the women as appalling. 'The way many women have been treated when trying to get treatment and support when they have had bad outcomes from mesh implants is appalling, including suggestions by medical professionals that anal intercourse is an alternative to vaginal intercourse after mesh implants have gone terribly wrong,' she said.