Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13052

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Rosen B.
Let Us Remember Barbara Seaman, Crusading Pioneer of the Women's Health
TPM Cafe 2008 Feb 29
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/28/let_us_remember_barbara_seaman_1/

Full text:

Let us pause, for a moment, to remember that one of the great activists
of the 20th century died on February 27th, of lung cancer, leaving
behind a legacy of critical challenges to the medical and pharmaceutical
industry. Though many people may not know her work-because she was
blacklisted from so many newspapers and magazines for her crusading
muckraking, all of us owe a great to her relentless pursuit of the
truth.

I have argued elsewhere that the women’s health movement was arguably
the greatest accomplishment of the modern women’s movement. If I am
right, then Barbara Seaman was also one of the most important activists
and journalists of that transformative collective resistance to the
over-medicalization of women’s lives.

Fiercely skeptical, Barbara Seaman early warned women about the dangers
of the birth control pill in her controversial book “The Doctor’s Case
Against the Pill” in 1969. As a result of her work and the hearing that
followed in the wake of its publication, strengthened warnings appeared
on birth control packages.

She never stopped.

In 1975, she helped found the National Women’s Health Network, which has
constantly acted as a watchdog and addressed dangers to women’s lives
from new medical and pharmaceutical practices and proposals.

Long before others recognized the danger of most middle-aged women
taking hormones to ease menopause. Seaman published in 1977 Women and
The Crisis in Sex Hormones and The Greatest Experiment ever Performed on
Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (2003).

The list goes on. Seaman was a tireless advocate and muckraker who, like
all truth tellers before her, relentless pursued the truth behind the
spurious claims of those who stood to profit from selling women youth
beauty and health.

Perhaps most importantly, Barbara Seaman, like the entire women’s health
movement, taught women to trust their own intuition, to listen to their
own bodies and never to trust doctors or commercial companies more than
themselves.

I am only one person who owes my life to Barbara Seaman’s work, because
I trusted my own intuition rather than the cavalier indifference of
physicians. No one will ever know how many others are alive because this
remarkable women worked to make the world safe for women.

Ruth Rosen is a journalist and historian. She is a senior fellow at the
Longview Institute in Berkeley and a professor emerita of history at the
University of California, Davis. She is currently a visiting professor
of public policy and history at U.C. Berkeley.