In the throes of puberty,14-year-old Su Robotti had developed “humongous breasts,” but she was still waiting for what she really wanted: her period. The year was 1969, and Robotti was filled with anxiety as she watched her friends, one-by-one, come to school and report that they had begun menstruating. All the while, she kept quiet, agonizing over when she’d ruin her first pair of underwear. At times, she even considered lying about it, but nervous thoughts would always inevitably halt her—she couldn’t even pretend she knew what cramps felt like.

Robotti’s mother, who had gotten her period when she was 12, was less anxious and more worried. At her mother’s insistence, Robotti found herself reclining in a gynecological chair. She watched as a doctor massage her lower abdomen as part of an external pelvic exam, and then listened to him deliver the report to her mother: Her reproductive organs were infant-sized and she only had one working ovary.

“I just felt like I wasn’t enough,” remembers Robotti today. At 59 years old, Robotti still hasn’t gotten her first period—and she never will.

Robotti is a “DES daughter,” born to one of the one in the estimated five to ten million women who took the first-ever synthetic estrogen, diethylstilbestrol, while pregnant. While marketed as a drug to help prevent miscarriages, the estrogen was pervasive, winding up in everything from prenatal vitamins to weekly shots to daily pills. Eventually, it would make its way into the blood of fetuses. When born, these children would often find themselves with abnormal reproductive organs—often causing infertility—and an elevated risk of developing various forms of cancer.

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