Starting in the 1940s, doctors prescribed a synthetic form of estrogen thought to prevent miscarriages and other complications to millions of pregnant women in the United States.
But in 1971, diethylstilbestrol, or DES, was banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after studies linked it to health problems in the children of women who used it, including infertility and a rare form of vaginal and cervical cancer. In the decades since then, children of DES users have sued pharmaceutical companies that produced the drug in courts across the country, accusing them of failing to test DES and misrepresenting it as safe.
