#dalkon shield

Ok, so here’s the thing, for some reason ProQuest doesn’t have any issues of my local newspaper for the tail end of 1983. So I’ll have to go back and cover 1983 in January.  Maybe this was a good mistake -- November 1, 1984 was a beast of a newspaper, full of ads, and the food section and the neighbors section! 

The Bowditch Ford logo always annoyed me from a design perspective. It looks like someone’s 12 year old kid drew the logo, and an adult drew the king. 

I can’t help but wonder if Zola retired so quickly after the 1984 Olympics because of the bumping incident with Mary Decker. I mentioned it before in one of my Favorite Commercial posts (of all places!). However, her retirement was short lived, she returned to the Olympics, competing for South Africa in 1992. 

aw, wedding hat! 

Maybe because I watch Adam-12 every day after work, but I’m getting big Adam-12 vibes from this troupe of “Angels” who watched over a neighborhood in Newport News on Halloween. 

The Dalkon Shield was a IUD like device that was discontinued due to harmful side effects from bacteria getting into the string. It looks like a scary ladybug attached to a string. 

A&N’s ads looked pretty much like this up until the time they shut down in 2008. 

I didn’t know we had Bradlees in Hampton back in 1984! Bradlees is just a store I don’t remember, because it left the Hampton Roads area back around 1989 when I was only six. It wasn’t a store my family frequented, like Sears of Kmart. I like that our local bus company, Pentran makes a special stop at Bradlees on Mondays through Saturdays. 

‘Yall know Company Man on Youtube? He needs to do a vid on the rise and fall of GNC. If you’ve been to a dead mall in the last 20 years, you know GNC because its the only store there along with Bath & Body Works. Walls and walls of protein powder and supplements that haven’t been touched in 5 years. The GNC of 1984 actually had real food like Tuna and raisins, yogurt and prunes. It’s kinda funny to think about going to the mall to buy tuna and peanut butter. 

I hope Jim Fuhs the lasagna making fireman is still with us today. 

I’m thinking that Farm Fresh used to be a lot larger back in the day, or they sold a lot less food. The Mr. T doll and Montgomery Moose! 

There has to be a catch on that $99 computer. 

Fae, the baby with the baboon heart died a couple of weeks after this article. 

This was back when we flew too close to the sun and thought we could cook anything including roast, cakes, and muffins in the microwave. 

 Here is the commercial for the E.T. Vitamins. Mr. Big reminds me of that episode of King of the Hill where Hank and the boys kidnap Dale’s new lawnmower. It wasn’t that episode, oops.  Yall know the scene. 

~Mr. Big~

well...i investigated where the Shoney’s once was in Hampton. It’s some dump for construction vehicles-- I think the restaurant was long torn down, but look: 

they kept the sign! You can see the “S” a little. 

There was a York Steak House at Newmarket North Mall?! 

Ok, Beautyland. Good thing people didn’t care too much about copyright back in 1984. 

Modern life isn’t perfect, but there are definitely some perks--like a whole lot more options when it comes to birth control. But what methods were couples using in the days of yore, while dialing land lines and watching Bewitched? Let’s get in the WABAC machine and find out!

*****

The first birth control pills had way higher doses of hormones than today's pills and the Senate held hearings in 1970 about their safety. Lower-dose birth control pills were manufactured after the risks of high doses of estrogen to women’s health were brought to light.

The Supreme Court’s 1972 Baird v. Eisenstadt ruling established that all women had a right to access birth control. The struggles for access of the 1960s were over—but new problems were on the horizon.

IUDs were trendy in the 70s, and one popular brand, the Dalkon Shield, turned out to have a flawed design that caused serious health problems and damaged the IUD’s reputation for many years. What could have been the heyday of one of the most effective methods instead turned a generation of women away from IUDs for good.

The silver lining? After Dalkon, the FDA began thoroughly vetting all medical devices, making future birth control innovations safer for everyone. Today, IUDs are one of the safest, most effective methods around, and have finally earned their spot in the limelight.

Groovy;)

This is the Dalkon Shield, a now out-of-commission IUD. It was on the market from 1971-1974, but the FUCKING CLAWS on it made it really easy to perforate the uterus on removal.