05/04/2025
Dear Winston Peters
On Thursday I almost became a paying member of New Zealand First, however by Friday afternoon I’m no longer even a voter or supporter of NZ First, much less willing to give you any money that I barely have to spare.
It’s a shame that you are using women for political gain, when you are only focusing on one part of women and totally ignoring, and perpetuating harm caused to many women year on year by permanently implanted gynaecological products that not only cost women any quality of life, but more often than not, leaves them struggling to obtain any satisfactory medical care, if they get any medical care at all.
Your intention to treat these devices as therapeutic is ignorant, if nothing short of arrogant. Many of them are far from therapeutic, but I think you already know this. I can’t help but wonder how much of the projected 11 Billion pharma stand to make from women’s devices is going to come your way in donations. You clearly don’t need any money from me, or any other woman in this country who is likely to become a victim of understudied devices permanently placed in a much-understudied segment of the population. A segment who represent the majority of medical device injuries in the system, who bear the brunt of this unregulated practice, and who are left with lives that are oftentimes felt like not worth living.
Women are left out in the cold when they are injured, there is no medical help, there is no financial help, there is no acceptance or recognition by the medical fraternity that we even exist. We are just like the tree that no one saw fall in the woods, that didn’t make a sound.
Until you have to watch a family member suffer life altering, and sometimes life-threatening side effects because no one is willing to listen and question the specialist profession or the device industry, you clearly have no chance of growing half an inch of compassion or empathy. I wouldn’t wish having to go through that on my worst enemy, but sometimes lived experience is the only experience that hammers home just how much damage can be done, to too many women, by the medical profession.
If you’ve forgotten about mesh already, shame on you. Just a therapeutic device the medical profession used w***y nilly, mainly on women.
You’re old enough to remember the dalkon shield too, but I guess you’ve forgotten about that as well. Is that because it’s a therapeutic device that only harmed women?
Heard of Adiana? I guess not, that only harmed women too. Just another therapeutic contraceptive device, designed to remain permanently in a women’s body, embedded in the reproductive system.
And if you think the debacle about the very permanent “therapeutic” device Essure will just remain hidden under the carpet, never to see the light of day, shame on you again. Because it is far from over.
Women deserve to know they were supposed to be monitored in 2017, they deserve to know how damaging this device can be, and they deserve to know that politicians have absolutely no intention of stopping the harm these devices cause from happening again and again.
It's a shame in your advocating for women; you’re taking the opportunity to fail so many at the same time. You know what we are, yet you’re unwilling to protect us from medical exploitation and harm.
