Sybil Shainwald, Lawyer Who Fought for Women’s Health, Dies at 96

Sybil Shainwald, a lawyer who for nearly half a century represented women whose health had been irreparably and often catastrophically harmed by poorly tested drugs and medical devices, died on April 9 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.

Her daughter Laurie Shainwald Kleeger announced the death, which was not widely reported.

Ms. Shainwald was 48 years old and newly graduated from law school when she was hired at Julien, Schlesinger & Finz, a New York City law firm, and assigned to the team representing Joyce Bichler, a 25-year-old social worker who was the survivor of a rare cancer, clear-cell adenocarcinoma of the vagina and cervix. Her cancer was caused by a drug her mother had taken during pregnancy: diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic hormone known as DES and sold under many brand names to prevent miscarriage.

At 18, Ms. Bichler had undergone a radical hysterectomy, which removed her ovaries, her fallopian tubes and two-thirds of her vagina. She was one of thousands of women who became known as DES daughters for the cancers and infertility they suffered because their mothers had taken the drug. She was suing Eli Lilly, one of the drug’s largest manufacturers, for damages.

In 1947, when 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 could cross the placenta and harm the fetus. Yet companies marketed it as a safe remedy for a catchall of conditions, from spotting during pregnancy to miscarriages, and continued to do so even after reports began to surface that it was, in fact, ineffective in treating those conditions.

In the late 1960s, cases of clear-cell adenocarcinoma began to be diagnosed in young women whose mothers had taken the drug. In 1971, the F.D.A. told doctors to stop prescribing it. By then, according to the National Cancer Institute, an estimated five to 10 million people — the women who had been prescribed it and their children — had been exposed to DES.

When Ms. Bichler’s case went to court in 1979, it was just another one of many lawsuits that had been filed over the years. None had been successful, however, because it was difficult to identify which manufacturer had produced the drug in each case. Some 300 companies had made DES.

Ms. Bichler’s team presented a novel argument: that all the manufacturers shared responsibility for the drug and its effects. After five days of deliberation, the jury agreed, and Ms. Bichler was awarded $500,000 in damages.

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 organs in a public setting, and it was overwhelming. I was terrified. Sybil was the only woman. She saw me, she held my hand, and she knew what was at stake.”

On the fourth day of the jury’s deliberations, Ms. Bichler said, Eli Lilly offered her a $100,000 settlement. Most of her team suggested that she might want to accept it.

“Sybil took my husband and me aside and said, ‘What do you and Mike want to do? Don’t be afraid,’” Ms. Bichler recalled. “Sybil gave me the power and the permission to say, ‘We’re not settling.’”

She added, “I did what I needed to do, but it was really Sybil that made it happen.”

By the early 1980s, she had opened her own office and was a go-to lawyer for DES daughters. Over the next four decades, she successfully represented many hundreds of women.

In 1996, she won a class-action lawsuit to establish a fund for DES daughters, paid for by the drug’s manufacturers, to cover medical and counseling expenses and an educational outreach program.

But DES wasn’t the only dangerous product she helped women receive compensation for.

She represented women whose silicone breast implants had caused autoimmune problems. She represented women who had been harmed by the Dalkon Shield — the intrauterine contraceptive that caused pelvic infections and infertility — and those who had been affected by Norplant, the long-acting subdermal contraceptive. (Years earlier, she had urged the F.D.A. not to approve the use of Norplant, warning of its yet unknown side effects.)

She helped women outside the United States receive compensation for their faulty breast implants, and for those who had been prescribed the Dalkon Shield. She was stunned to learn that women in Africa had never been told of the Dalkon Shield’s side effects and that doctors there were still prescribing it, even after it had been pulled from the American market.

She also lectured on the dangers of Depo-Provera, another long-acting contraceptive linked to cancers in lab animals that had nonetheless been prescribed for decades, starting in the late 1960s, to women in some 80 countries as well as the United States, where it had been given to poor, minority and disabled women — a pernicious form of population control, as she saw it, for those deemed unfit by society — though it would not be approved by the F.D.A. for use as a contraceptive until 1992.

“Contraceptive development has always meant drugs and devices for women,” Ms. Shainwald said in an oral history conducted by the organization Veteran Feminists of America in 2019. “We pay with our tax dollars for the research and with our lives for the results.”

Ms. Shainwald “was an important legal fighter for the women’s health movement,” said Cindy Pearson, the former executive director of the National Women’s Health Network. “She would sink her teeth into an issue, 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 James Madison High School in Brooklyn and entered the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., where she earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1948.

She married Sidney Shainwald, an accountant and consumer advocate — he was the associate director of Consumers Union, now Consumer Reports — in 1960, and taught English in junior high schools while raising their four children.

She earned a master’s degree in history at Columbia University in 1972, and that same year she won a grant to create an oral history of the consumer movement and establish the Center for the Study of the Consumer Movement, which she directed until 1978.

She entered New York Law School as a night student when she was 44 and earned her law degree in 1976. She had hopes of studying law at Columbia when she was getting her history degree there — the school offered a joint program — but was told by the dean, as she recalled in the 2019 oral history, “You will take the place of a man who will practice for 40 years.”

Ms. Shainwald was still referring cases at her death.

In addition to Ms. Kleeger, Ms. 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 that I have a few more years of work ahead of me, since my practice consists of suing corporate America on behalf of women,” Ms. Shainwald said in a speech in 2016. “And, sadly enough, I will never lack for business.”