The Strange Sad Tale Of The Death Of The Diaphragm

Diaphragms have been around nearly as long as sex has. What happened to them?

A few months ago, I went into a new OB/GYN’s office for an appointment. The nurse sat down with me to go over my information. She asked me what kind of birth control I was using.

“The diaphragm,” I said.

She looked up from her clipboard at that. “The diaphragm? They still make those?”

I laughed and assured her that of course they still make the diaphragm; it’s not going anywhere.

Except the nurse was right: Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Ortho-All Flex, the most widely-used diaphragm on the U.S. market, had been discontinued three years earlier.

This was news to me, but it wasn’t news. Janssen quietly pulled the Ortho All-Flex off the market in December of 2013, leaving, at the time, only one diaphragm in the U.S. market. (That diaphragm, the Milex, was a different fit, and not all doctors were able or willing to prescribe it.)

‘The diaphragm? They still make those?’

The diaphragm, which in the earliest part of the 20th century was the most-used form of birth control among women in the U.S., was suddenly a lot more difficult to…