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The First Lady Of Women’s Health (10/06/2004) From oral contraceptives to estrogen therapy, Barbara Seaman has been exposing pharmaceutical industry cover-ups of drug health risks for 30 years. Linda K. Nathan - Special To The Jewish Week
Barnes & Noble named it one of the year’s “best,” and it was the only book chosen by both the American Library Association and the Library Journal as “one of the best” for 2003. If that’s not enough to calm her critics, The Nation magazine cited Seaman’s book as “a major triumph for the women’s health movement” by debunking drug-industry hype over hormone replacement therapy and exposing it instead as a factor that can increase a woman’s risk of cancer and heart disease. Munching on an egg roll recently in a Chinese restaurant near her home on the Upper West Side, Seaman calls her latest expose of the “menopause industry” the “fourth in my trilogy.” First came “The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill” in 1969, which showed links between oral contraceptives and blood clots, heart attacks, and cancer. That book prompted congressional hearings in 1970, which were disrupted by young feminists loudly demanding to know why patients were not allowed to testify and why there was no pill for men. With wide international press coverage, these hearings became known as the “Boston Tea Party” of the women’s health movement, subsequently resulting in health warnings placed on oral contraceptives — the first on any prescription drug. A 25th anniversary edition of the book in 1995 prompted Science magazine to name “The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill” as the book that fueled a “blossoming of women’s health research.” After her second book, “Free and Female: The Sex Life of the Contemporary Woman” was published in 1972, the Library of Congress named Seaman as the author “who raised sexism as a health-care issue.” Soon after, “Free and Female” was published in Israel, becoming the first American feminist book to be translated into Hebrew. Then in 1977, Seaman’s third book, “Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones,” convinced the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to convene a government task force on DES, an estrogen treatment that caused cancer in the daughters of women whose doctors had prescribed it to prevent miscarriages. How then could her accomplishments in research and reporting lead to dismissals from these national publications — Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, and Hadassah magazine? “After my first hormone book, the drug companies were after me,” Seaman explains. And they wanted her axed. At that time, from 1965-69, she was a columnist and contributing editor at Ladies Home Journal, a magazine that received major advertising from Johnson & Johnson baby products. The company’s Ortho division, however, was also a leader in the manufacture of birth control pills. Several years later in 1972, Seaman continues, “ I was a contributing editor at Family Circle when ‘Free and Female’ came out,” attacking the idea that “hormones don’t make you feminine forever. But what I didn’t know was that American Home Products, which made the hormone Premarin, also made E-Z Off Oven Cleaner and Preparation H for hemorrhoids,” consumer products that advertised in Family Circle. Case closed. Seaman was booted out. At Hadassah magazine, where Seaman penned a popular health column from 2000-2003, she was told last year to stop writing about hormones, even though the subject clearly resonated with female readers. Nonetheless, Seaman wrote two more hormone columns; then she was dismissed. (The magazine contended that her column was always late — although it was never too late to be published, Seaman countered.) Why would Hadassah magazine really want Seaman out of the way? Hadassah, the organization, has a women’s health division that “receives money from Eli Lily,” the drug maker, Seaman explains. And “The Greatest Experiment” had criticized Eli Lily for suppressing information on the harmful effects of DES. Hadassah officials confirm that the division did get money from Eli Lilly but deny that the funding had anything to do with Seaman’s firing. Seaman is not bitter about her dismissals, preferring instead to focus on her more than 40 years as women’s health advocate and muckraking journalist. When asked how much time it took to write “The Greatest Experiment,” Seaman answers: “My whole life.” Born in Depression-era Brooklyn to a social activist father who later worked for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and an English teacher mother whose super-smart students included the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Seaman credits her early Jewish identity for helping to nurture her interest in women’s health. Perhaps, she muses, the mikveh started it all. Because of that ritual, “Jewish women were traditionally more aware of sharing their nakedness and more eager to discuss their female concerns,” Seaman believes. She also cites “tikkun olam,” the Jewish desire to “give back” and “repair the world” as another reason why “the American women’s health movement was always fueled by Jewish women.” The National Women’s Health Network, based in Washington, for example, was started by five women, four of whom were Jewish. (Seaman calls the network the “not-for-profit eyes, ears, and voice of the woman patient, supported by its membership, accepts no ‘dirty money,’ i.e. money from the drug industry.”) And the bible of women’s health, “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” began as a collective of 12 women; nine of them Jewish. As a Jew especially, Seaman recoils at this nugget she uncovered during her research: The Nazis experimented with liquid estrogen during World War II by slipping it into the soup of Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. The goal? To secretly sterilize prisoners in order to “purify” Germany. The practice of giving women drugs without informing them of the consequences is an experiment that persists, Seaman says, supported by corporate interests and by many members of a complicit medical establishment who are fed “science by press release.” She recalls her first personal encounter with this practice: The year was 1957. Seaman had just given birth to her eldest child, Noah, whom she wanted to breastfeed. She did so, even though doctors strongly discouraged her, believing that well-marketed infant formula was superior. Noah’s health was weakening, and Seaman grew suspicious of the pills she was being given each morning. “The nurses wouldn’t tell me what I was taking, although I had the right to know.” Persisting, she found out that doctors were prescribing laxatives, which she was transmitting to her son through breast milk and which were threatening his health. One year later, Seaman looked on helplessly as her 49-year-old Aunt Sally lay dying from endometrial cancer; doctors blamed the cancer on estrogen treatments given to Sally for menopause relief. “Healthy baby, healthy aunt — and both of them poisoned by prescription,” Seaman remembers. Seaman continues to write for major magazines (Oprah’s O magazine asked Seaman, “the reporter,” it says, “who alerted the world to the dangers of birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy, to investigate the risks of pushing the reproductive envelope” with fertility drugs; that article appeared in February 2004.) Seaman can be seen on PBS specials, talk shows, and as a guest speaker around the country. Yet, her sense of family keeps her always involved with her three children, four grandchildren, and stepmother, journalist Ruth Gruber, with whom she has traveled to Israel. After Seaman’s mother died, “I fixed my father up with Ruth,” a widow Seaman says she met through their mutual interests as professional authors. She sets aside quality time, too, for her service on the board of the Rabin Medical Center in Israel. “I do some writing for them,” Seaman says; “I try to call attention to their outstanding work..” Calling attention to health issues is clearly what makes Seaman run. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) reminded his colleagues of his constituent’s achievements in his remarks last year on the floor of the House of Representatives: “We cannot quantify how many lives Barbara Seaman has saved through her activism, or how many lives she changed. … I salute Barbara Seaman as a national role model.” |
For
a journalist who says she’s been fired from her jobs at
three national women’s magazines because of her exposés
of the drug industry, 69-year-old Barbara Seaman is sitting pretty.
Her latest book, “The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed
on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth” (Hyperion, 2003),
which recently came out in soft cover, was selected by The New
York Times Book Review as a “new and notable paperback.”