By Charis McGowan and Natalie Alcoba
Santiago, Chile
February 23, 2021, 11:00am
VICE WORLD NEWS

Women In Chile Got Pregnant After Using Faulty Government Birth Control Pills

SANTIAGO, Chile - When Melanie Riffo discovered she was pregnant last September, she knew that something didn’t add up.

The 20-year-old from the southern Chilean city of Chillán had been careful. She took the birth control pills she was prescribed and given by her local public health clinic, always followed her nurse’s instructions, and she even took extra precautions. But she still got pregnant.

"I never considered becoming a mother at this age. I wanted to go to school, which is already expensive here - and now it’ll be even harder for me to afford,” she said.

Riffo’s unexpected pregnancy could have been the fault of botched contraceptive pills called Anulette. She’d kept her packet, and saw that her exact batch, number B20035, had been recalled three months after she had received them.

According to the recall information, placebo pills were mistakenly swapped with active ones - an error that has now been blamed for more than 100 unwanted pregnancies. The government offered no further information on how to help those already affected.

Silesia, the laboratory that manufactures Anulette, also issued a warning about the batch, yet failed to give an apology or offer help for women experiencing unwanted pregnancies. During a television interview on national news, the laboratory said that the packaging issue existed in only 12 of the recalled products, but they have not been able to inspect all the boxes. They also insisted that the state should have checked the pills, before handing them out in clinics.

“Women were trusting the pills they were given by state-run clinics. The fault is not only with the laboratory but also with the government. They are both responsible,” said Anita Peña Saavedra, director of Chilean reproductive rights organization Corporacion Miles. The group is taking legal action on behalf of all of the women who became pregnant while taking Anulette when the defective pills were circulated.

It’s estimated that nearly 267,000 defective boxes, corresponding to two faulty batches of Anulette, were distributed across 26 public health clinics in the country before the recall was issued. Riffo’s experience is not unique - Miles currently counts at least 112 women in Chile whom they believe are pregnant because of the faulty pills.

Activists say the cases highlight the need for greater reproductive rights in Chile, where abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, if the mother’s life is at risk, or the fetus cannot survive outside the womb.

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