The Mesh Files: Inside the Medical Device That Mutilated 500,000 Women
Preface
This essay draws primarily from chapters 37 and 38 of Gardiner Harris’s groundbreaking exposé “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson” (2025), which meticulously documents how one of America’s most trusted healthcare companies systematically harmed millions while projecting an image of care and responsibility. Harris, a veteran medical journalist, spent years investigating Johnson & Johnson’s pattern of launching products they knew would injure or kill, then manipulating the medical system to protect profits over patients. The Prolift vaginal mesh disaster represents perhaps the clearest example of this predatory pattern.
The story Harris tells through court documents, internal emails, and survivor testimonies is supported by two other essential works that frame the broader context of medical violence against women. Dr. Robert Mendelsohn’s “Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women” (1981) identified decades ago how medicine treats women’s bodies as inherently defective and in need of aggressive intervention. Jennifer Block’s “Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution” (2019) updates this analysis with contemporary evidence of how the medical system continues to profit from unnecessary surgeries, particularly on women’s reproductive organs. Together, these authors reveal that Prolift wasn’t an aberration but the predictable result of a system that views women’s bodies as sites for profit extraction.
What makes this story particularly urgent is how close it comes to home. In 2015—three years after Johnson & Johnson had stopped selling Prolift and amid mounting evidence of mesh disasters—my wife was still recommended mesh surgery by a gynecologist who never performed an internal examination, never discussed alternatives, and assured her of the procedure’s safety while assumptively instructing his nurse to schedule surgery. Her story—detailed in later sections—illustrates how the predatory patterns Harris documents persisted even after manufacturers withdrew products, showing how deeply these practices are embedded in gynecological culture. She escaped harm only by trusting other women’s warnings over medical authority and finding that simple exercises could resolve what surgery would have destroyed.
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