Morton Mintz

From the Preface of At Any Cost
(New York: 1985, Pantheon):

"The story of the Dalkon Shield [IUD] lays bare the perils inherent in a system that allows corporations to profit even if they put human beings at risk. The Dalkon Shield created a disaster of global proportions because a few men with little on their minds but megabucks made decisions, in the interest of profit, that exposed millions of women to serious infection, sterility, and even death.

"The problem is not simply that corporations have no conscience, but that they are endowed by law with rights far beyond those allowed to individuals. Corporations too often act without compassion and, no matter what damage they cause, without remorse. Even worse, they cannot be held accountable, as people can be. You cannot lock up a corporations, or sentence it to hard labor or the electric chair. And too often the law fails to look behind the corporate veil, to prosecute the individuals and act in the name of the corporation....

"Edward Ross warned--in 1907--that the insistence on defining sin and misconduct in an industrial society in the same way as it was defined in the past was exacting a terrible price. He saw the absurdity of condemning what a man does in the bedroom but not what he did in the boardroom. [U.S. District Judge] Miles Lord repeated--in 1984--that we still haven't grasped that the man who assaults women from an office chair is as grave a sinner as the man who assaults a woman in an alley. Surely the time has come to extend the definition of immoral conduct into the boardroom and the corporate office. Ross said that the public 'beholds sin in a false perspective, seeing peccadilloes as crimes and crimes as peccadilloes.' Heeding Ross's admonition, I try here to behold the Dalkon Shield catastrophe in a true perspective."

While Editorial Director of U.S. News and World Report, Harold Evans wrote of At Any Cost: "At one level this is a book about a birth-control device that was a lethal failure. At another it is about the ethics of loyalty: How can decent men and women perform acts of cruelty and deceit which will ruin untold lives? Morton Mintz shows how it happens very easily within the morally anonymous corporation. In an age of retreat from government regulation, At Any Cost is an especially important book."

Ralph Nader called the "meticulous report" "a call to prosecute crime in the suites at least as forcefully as we do crime in the streets. The unraveling of the Dalkon Shield violence by trial lawyers reads like a detective story and ends with searing lessons for corporate executives who try to escape accountability, for regulatory agencies that do not regulate, and for potential victims who must ever be on the alert."