Over the last two decades, mifepristone’s dramatic origin story has made its way into books and the pages of the New York Times. But the tale of who funded this effort to legally bring it to women across the country, and what benefits the funders might reap from their investments, has been mostly kept quiet. This was in part because the 1990s were the apex of anti-abortion violence, so investors required secrecy. It was also because the funding sources seemed like a minor plot point in a project that had the potential to transform reproductive health care for millions.
“I don’t think anybody thinks they’re going to make a lot of money,” Peg Yorkin, one of the activists crucial to the US mifepristone campaign, told the Los Angeles Times when the pill became available. “We’re just happy that it’s going to be happening.”
But the small group of investors who backed the Population Council’s drive to manufacture and distribute the drug since its earliest days have made a lot of money on the mifepristone business—tens of millions of dollars, according to court filings. Their windfall has come through a byzantine corporate structure set up in the 1990s by a private equity fund, now called MedApproach Holdings, to allow investors to pour money into Danco Labs—until 2019 the only US retailer of mifepristone—without disclosing their identities. As states have imposed ever-stricter limits on abortion access, their investments have generated hefty returns.
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last June, undoing the federal right to abortion—and the FDA’s announcement, in January, that retail pharmacies can now sell abortion pills—these investors are likely to earn even more, as medication abortion becomes the only option for millions of women living in the 26 states where abortion is now illegal or severely restricted. The potential is so promising that two of the primary investors have engaged in a bitter court battle to take control of the investment, and Danco itself.
Their story has a dizzying plot that involves Cayman Islands shell companies, LLCs named after racehorses, a shadowy priest, a disbarred attorney, and a finance whiz behind an infamous Wall Street hedge fund collapse. The legal battle, which has been fought in three states and cost millions in attorneys’ fees, shows how investors have come to view the desperation of pregnant women as an important problem to solve—but also a golden ticket.