The Abortion Pill's Secret Money Men

The untold story of the private equity investors behind Mifeprex-and their escalating legal battle to cash in post-Dobbs

- Hannah Levintova

In 1993, a group of activists rented a warehouse in suburban Westchester County, New York. It was smaller than they'd hoped and had limited ventilation, but the two other locations they'd tried to rent belonged to universities and required jumping through too many bureaucratic hoops-the exact sort of paper trail this group was trying to avoid.

Led by renowned pro-choice activist Lawrence Lader, their goal was to replicate RU-486, the revolutionary abortion pill developed in the 1980s by French manufacturer RousselUclaf-which was unwilling to navigate American abortion politics to bring the pill stateside. Lader's group, code-named ARM Research Council, set up shop just months after Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed outside his Florida clinic, the first US physician to be murdered by an anti-abortion activist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no US manufacturer wanted to wade into the increasingly fraught abortion debate to bring the medication to American women, either. So with the help of lawyers and activists, Lader had smuggled RU-486 into the United States, and his group was going to try to reproduce it.

In their warehouse, they got to work building an underground drug laboratory, complete with a huge, customized ventilation hood, fire prevention devices, and specially designed sinks. The whole project "had the trappings of a CIA operation," Lader would later write. They figured out a system for replenishing their near-constant need for dry ice from a supplier 15 miles away, and crafted a strategy to avoid detection by anti-abortion groups, the garbage collector, and their landlord. If anyone asked what they were up to, the group-which included a doctor who lived 1,000 miles away and asked to go by Dr. X; a Columbia University chemist working for free; and two assistants-agreed on a cover story: They were working on a new treatment for cancer.