The Green Party spring conference in Liverpool unanimously supported an emergency motion moved by the Green Party Women group backing calls by the British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons for tighter regulation of the cosmetic surgery industry.
Jenny Jones, Green Party Mayoral Candidate said: "The PIP breast implant scandal has not only exposed the nefarious practices of one French company that shipped hundreds of thousands of defective medical devices around the world.
"It has also thrown light on the disturbing reality of this lucrative industry. I don’t think most people realised, and I am concerned that even many recipients may not have fully grasped, that the expected life of an implant is only 10 to 15 years, so young women having these implants are facing regular surgery to deal with them over their lives – major, unnecessary operations.
"We tend to assume in Britain that any medical service on offer is properly regulated and the practices of individuals audited and monitored, yet it is clear that this is not the case."
Natalie Bennett, chair of Green Party Women and London Assembly candidate, said: "I think many of us have been disturbed by those airbrushed adverts of apparently perfectly formed women marching in spookily unnatural rows on Tube adverts. And we worried about the pressure being put particularly on young woman to mutilate their bodies with dangerous and expensive surgery.
"But we hadn’t recognised just how much of a cowboy industry this is.
"Of course some cosmetic surgery is necessary and important – for accident victims, for cancer patients, for individuals born with disfiguring disabilities – but they will be told about medical options available to them by their doctors. Just as we ban advertising of drugs direct to patients for prescription drugs, advertising of cosmetic surgery should be banned to stop its normalisation and spread."
Natalie added: "it is also disturbing to learn from the BAAPS campaign that many of the cosmetic treatments such as ‘dermal fillers’ are far less regulated in Europe than in the US, and that vastly more products are available here than there. This clearly has to stop. Injecting deadly toxin into your face in the form of botulism toxin is clearly a bad idea, but we have to fear that other medical horrors are lurking out in the industry."
