Sybil Shainwald, a lawyer who represented almost half a century of women whose health was irreparable and often catastrophic damaged by poorly tested drugs and medical devices, died in her house in Manhattan on 9 April. She was 96.
Her daughter Laurie Shainwald Kleeger announced Death, who was not reported in a general way.
Mrs. Shainwald was 48 years old and only studied law study when she was hired in Julien, Schlesinger & Finz, a law firm in New York City, and assigned to the team representing Joyce Bichler, a 25-year social worker who was the survivor of a sobreful cancer and Clear-cell. Her cancer was caused by a medicine that her mother had used during pregnancy: Diethylstilbestol, A synthetic hormone that is known as des And sold under many brand names to prevent a miscarriage.
At the age of 18, Mrs. Bichler had undergone a radical hysterectomy, which removed her ovaries, her fallopian tubes and two-thirds from her vagina. She was one of the thousands of women who became known as the daughters for the cancers and infertility they suffered because their mothers had used the drug. She sued Eli Lilly, one of the greatest manufacturers of the drug, for damage.
In 1947, when des des was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in pregnant women, studies had shown that it produced cancers in mice and rats and that It can cross the placenta and harm the fetus. Nevertheless, companies did it on the market as a safe remedy for a catching disorders, from spotting during pregnancy to miscarriages, and continued to do so, even after reports that it was not actually effective in the treatment of those disorders.
In the late sixties, cases of adenocarcinoma began to be diagnosed with clear cell in young women whose mothers had taken the drug. In 1971 the FDA told doctors to stop prescribing it. By that time, According to the National Cancer InstituteAn estimated five to 10 million people – the women who had prescribed it and their children – were exposed to DES.
When Mrs. Bichler’s case went to court in 1979, it was simply one of the many lawsuits that had been filed over the years. However, nobody had been successful because it was difficult to determine which manufacturer the medicine had produced in any case. About 300 companies had made DES.
Mrs Bichler’s team presented a new argument: that all manufacturers shared the responsibility for the medicine and its effects. After five days of deliberation, the jury agreed and Mrs Bichler received $ 500,000 compensation.
Ms. Shainwald’s Role Was Crucial, Ms. Bichler Said in an interview: “I was this Shy Young Woman Having All these Men talk about my Private Female Organans in a Public Setting, and It Was Overhelming. I Was Terrified. Sybil was the only Woman. She Saw Me, She’s Hand, and Shew.”
On the fourth day of the jury’s deliberations, Mrs. Bichler said, Eli Lilly offered her a settlement of $ 100,000. The majority of her team suggested that she might want to accept it.
“Sybil took my husband and me aside and said:” What do you want to do and Mike? Don’t be afraid “, Mrs. Bichler remembered.” Sybil gave me the power and permission to say, “We don’t settle.”
She added: “I did what I had to do, but it was really Sybil who made it.”
By the early 1980s, she had opened her own office and was a lawyer for the Daughters. In the next four decades she successfully represented many hundreds of women.
In 1996 she won a class-action right to set up a fund for the daughters, paid by the manufacturers of the medicine, to cover medical and counseling costs and an educational outreach program.
But DES was not the only dangerous product where she helped women to get compensation.
They represented women whose silicone breast implants had caused car -immune problems. They represented women who had been damaged by the Dalkon-Schild-the intrauterine contraceptive that pelvic infections and infertility and those affected by Norplant, the long-acting subdermal contraceptive. (Years earlier, at the FDA, she had insisted on not approving the use of Norplant, warning for the still unknown side effects.)
She helped women outside the United States to get compensation for their defective breast implants, and for those prescribed the Dalkon Shield. She was stunned to hear that women in Africa were never told about the side effects of the Dalkon Shield and that doctors still prescribe there, even after it had been taken out of the American market.
She also gave a lecture about the dangers of Depo-Provera, another long-acting contraceptive linked to cancers in laboratory animals who nevertheless had been prescribed for decades, starting in the late 1960s, to women in about 80 countries and the United States-where it was to poor, minority and disabled women A pernicious form of population control, as it saw, for those who are deemed unsuitable by society – Although it would not be approved by the FDA for use as a contraceptive until 1992.
“The development of contraception has always meant drugs and devices for women,” Mrs. Shainwald said in an oral history of the organization -sailing feminists from America in 2019. “We pay with our tax dollars for the investigation and with our lives for the results.”
Mrs Shainwald “was an important legal hunter for the women’s health movement,” says Cindy Pearson, the former executive director of the National Women’s Health Network. “She would sink her teeth in a problem, and it didn’t matter how big her opponent was.”
Sybil Brodkin was born on April 27, 1928 in New York City, the only daughter of Anne (Zimmerman) Brodkin and Morris Brodkin, who owned a restaurant. She was 16 when she graduated from the James Madison High School in Brooklyn and went to the college of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, from, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in history in 1948.
She married Sidney Shainwald, an accountant and consumer lawyer – he was the associated director of Consumers Union, now consumer reports – in 1960, and gave English on Junior High Schools while raising their four children.
In 1972 she obtained a master’s degree in history at Columbia University, and that same year she won a subsidy to create an oral history of the consumer movement and the Center for the study of the consumer movement, which she directed until 1978.
She went to the New York Law School as a night student when she was 44 and obtained her straightforward diploma in 1976. She hoped that she was studying Law in Columbia when she obtained her history diploma – the school offered a joint program – but was told by the dean, as she remembered in the oral history of 2019, “
Mrs. Shainwald still referred things to her death.
In addition to Mrs. Kleeger, Mrs. Shainwald is survived by another daughter, Louise Nasr; A son, Robert; A brother, Barry Schwartz; Four grandchildren; And five great -grandchildren. Mr. Shainwald died in 2003. Her daughter Marsha Shainwald died in 2013.
“I know I have a few more years of work for me, because my practice consists of suing business America on behalf of women,” Mrs. Shainwald said in a speech in 2016. “And unfortunately I will never miss things.”