The Flood of Lawsuits That Are Due to Come: DES Daughters and the Legal System in the United States

In the absence of scientific consensus, U.S. law became a key arena for deciding how hormonally mediated injury could be known, measured, and recognized. In the 1980s and 90s, DES Daughters, a group of women who faced elevated risks of reproductive abnormalities and cancer after in utero exposure to DES, entered courts and legislatures seeking recognition of harm that medicine could not yet fully explain. While scholars such as Susan Bell and Emily Johnston have emphasized embodiment, narrative, and identity in DES activism, this paper identifies a different feminist intervention: the labor required to scientize embodiment. This method draws on history of science and feminist science and technology studies, particularly scholarship on co-production and evidentiary infrastructures, to analyze how standards of credibility, causation, and expertise were forged at the intersection of legal and biomedical authority. Using the papers of one of the foremost lawyers, Sybil Shainwald, involved in their litigation, this analysis argues that legal institutions played a decisive role in adjudicating between embodied experience and scientific authority, compelling activists to translate experiential harm into evidentiary forms that could satisfy emerging standards of proof. Through registries, longitudinal studies, expert testimony, and legislative advocacy, this case demonstrates an avenue through which endocrine disruption acquired legal meaning through those contested standards of proof, revealing law as a critical site in the co-production of feminist health knowledge, medical authority, and regulatory recognition.