Essure Aware NZ

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Nine Years of Silence: Why the Government Must Stop Ignoring Essure-Injured Women

Enough Already: Women Have a Right to Know When Something Goes Wrong, and to Be Cared For When It Does

Essure Aware
6–9 minutes
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This month marks nine years since the Essure permanent contraceptive device was pulled from the New Zealand market. Nine years in which the women who carry it inside their bodies have never been contacted, never been offered monitoring, and never been given a clinical pathway for assessment or removal.

That is not an oversight. After a Parliamentary petition, a Health New Zealand team and a year of meetings with affected women, it is a choice. And it is a choice the Government can still reverse.


Essure was sold to New Zealand women from 2010 as a quick, “non-surgical” alternative to having your tubes tied. Two small metal coils were placed in the fallopian tubes, where they were designed to provoke inflammation and scarring that would block them. The only real measure of success was whether a woman got pregnant.

In September 2017 the device lost its European CE mark and Medsafe issued a recall. The recall letter and hazard alert went to implanting physicians. They described side effects not previously reported, including pain, perforation and allergic reactions, and noted that removal could improve symptoms (Ministry of Health OIA release). In the United States, the FDA had already added its strongest boxed warning.

What did not happen matters more. The women were never told. No one knows exactly how many there are: at least seven district health boards and an unknown number of private gynaecologists offered the procedure, and the Auckland Women’s Health Council estimates more than 1,000 women received it. There is no register. There was no recall letter to patients. Their GPs were not told either.

So women with the recognised symptoms, chronic pelvic pain, heavy bleeding, fragments of coil migrating into the abdomen, nickel reactions, fatigue and cognitive fog, have spent years being investigated for everything except the metal implant in their bodies. Many only discovered the recall by finding each other online.

A promise, then silence

In 2024 I launched a Parliamentary petition. It asked for three things: an investigation into Essure harm, every implanted woman to be contacted, and ACC to cover the cost of injury (1News). The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists responded by calling on Health New Zealand to make sure affected women had access to information, advice and care.

For a moment, it looked like the system was listening. Health New Zealand set up a dedicated Essure team to work with affected women and the Auckland Women’s Health Council on next steps. Some of us spent a year in those meetings, spending energy we barely had to explain the harm and help design a response.

We last met in April 2025. Since then, nothing.

No plan. No guidance for GPs. No contact initiative. When the Council’s Sue Claridge recently emailed the leaders of the Essure team for an update, no one replied. Meanwhile, new women keep arriving in our online support groups, frightened and looking for answers no doctor has given them.

A co-design process that simply stops is worse than no process at all. It tells injured women their time and trauma were a box to tick.

The cost of looking away

Without a pathway, every Essure-injured woman has to find her own way through the health system. In practice that means years of fragmented appointments, each specialist seeing one symptom and none seeing the whole, and for some, a Give-A-Little page in the hope they can raise the funds to seek specialist treatment overseas.

The physical cost compounds. Women are prescribed medication after medication for pain, bleeding and inflammation that removal might have eased. Coils left in place for years can fragment and migrate, which makes eventual removal harder and more likely to end in a hysterectomy. For some of us that has meant early menopause, lost bone, lost teeth, and a body that no longer works the way it did.

The psychological cost is just as real. Being told for years that your tests are “non-specific” or that it’s “just stress” teaches you to doubt your own body. When I sought counselling, a psychiatrist recommended I not discuss Essure at all because it might be “triggering”. That is not care. It is containment.

Many of us now avoid doctors entirely, not because we don’t want help but because each appointment risks another dismissal. That is how a treatable problem becomes a lifelong one. Women in Aotearoa already spend an average of 18 years of their lives in poor health. Leaving a known device harm unmonitored only widens that gap.

Why the existing safety nets can’t fix this

We are often told to go through the proper channels. We have. They were not built for this.

  • ACC decides claims one at a time, on the evidence a treating specialist chooses to record. If a surgeon or pathologist leaves the device out of the notes, the claim fails. As of September 2023, ACC had accepted just 4 of 9 Essure treatment injury claims.
  • The Health and Disability Commissioner investigates individual complaints about individual providers. It cannot order a national recall, fund a clinic, or fix a failure that belongs to no single clinician.
  • Medsafe regulates products, not patient care. Its recall reached implanting physicians, not the women who received the device.

Each agency can point to another. The result is a gap in which no one is responsible for the women themselves. Only the Government, through the Minister of Health and Health New Zealand, has the power to close it.

The Government has done this before

This is not an impossible ask. New Zealand has already built exactly this kind of response for another group of women harmed by a gynaecological implant.

After women injured by surgical mesh told their stories through a 2019 restorative justice process, the Ministry of Health acted on its recommendations. The result is the New Zealand Female Pelvic Mesh Service, run from Christchurch and Auckland with remote consultations nationwide. It offers multidisciplinary assessment, imaging, pain management, physiotherapy, psychology and surgical removal, with travel costs for the patient and a support person covered. It is funded by Health New Zealand together with ACC.

The skills, the funding model and the precedent all exist. Essure-injured women are asking for the same recognition. The only thing missing is the decision to extend it to us.

What a meaningful outcome looks like

A meaningful outcome is not another round of meetings. It is five practical steps:

  1. Find and tell every woman. Use hospital and private records to identify Essure recipients, and write to each of them and their GP about the recall, the known risks and where to get help.
  2. Give GPs and gynaecologists clear guidance. Publish national clinical guidance on Essure symptoms, imaging, and safe removal, so no woman has to educate her own doctor.
  3. Create a specialist pathway. Extend the Female Pelvic Mesh Service, or build an equivalent, to offer Essure assessment and removal by experienced surgeons, free and accessible regardless of where a woman lives.
  4. Fix the ACC evidence gap. Where a device has been recalled for known harms, stop making the injured woman prove what the recall already acknowledged.
  5. Reopen the conversation, and keep it open. Health New Zealand should resume work with affected women and the Auckland Women’s Health Council, with published timelines and regular public updates.

None of this is radical. Most of it is what should have happened in 2017.

Silence is not neutral

The Cartwright Inquiry taught this country that women must be told the truth about what is happening to their bodies, and that institutions must answer for it. Essure is a test of whether that lesson still holds.

Every month of inaction is another month of avoidable pain for women who don’t yet know why they are sick. The Government cannot undo the harm already done. It can decide that no more women will be left to find out on their own.

I have also asked the Human Rights Commission to look into this. But the fastest route to a meaningful outcome runs through the Minister of Health. If this matters to you, please share this piece and write to your local MP and the Minister. Ask them one question: what is the plan for women with Essure?

Nine years is long enough.

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