Better

The New York Times could take a lesson from their West Coast namesake on obituary writing. No equivocations, no bows to critics, no mining trivial events from her personal life.

LATimes: Barbara Seaman, 72; author sparked modern women's health movement

By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 2, 2008
Barbara Seaman, a writer and health activist whose groundbreaking 1969 book that warned against the dangers of the birth control pill is widely credited with launching the modern women's health movement, has died. She was 72.

Seaman died of lung cancer Wednesday at her New York City home, said her son, Noah Seaman.

In her first book, "The Doctors' Case Against the Pill," Seaman exposed the serious and little-known side effects of the high-estrogen pill prescribed at the time. Women weren't warned that the pill could cause heart attacks, strokes, depression and a host of other ills.

Her investigative work prompted Senate hearings in 1970 that led to a warning label on the drug and the mandatory inclusion of patient-information inserts.

When women who had been harmed by the pill were barred from testifying at the hearings, they fought back by constantly interrupting, calling out questions such as "Why isn't there a pill for men?" and "Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?" Seaman wrote 30 years later in the New York Times.

Those acts of "feminist disobedience," as Seaman called them, are often portrayed as ground zero of the women's health movement.

Judy Norsigian, an author of the pioneering women's health book "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (1973), told the Los Angeles Times last week that the protests were "the beginning of women's voices being heard in women's health."

"It was an extraordinary moment, and Barbara was responsible for getting that movement off the ground," Norsigian said.

With four other women in 1975, Seaman founded the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

According to Cynthia A. Pearson, the network's executive director, "the kind of journalism that Barbara started doing back in the 1960s . . . affected most of the women in this country. It led to more women in medical school, more written information in patient's hands, the breaking down of rules against dads in the delivery room. It was profound."

Carol Downer, who co-founded the Los Angeles Feminist Women's Health Center in 1971, said Seaman's high-profile support was invaluable.

"We were very grass-roots and she took to us and smoothed the path for us over the years," Downer said. "She was just a hub of the women's health movement. She brought the best out in all of us, and she had an impact on women's health around the world."

The 1957 birth of Seaman's first child greatly influenced her career path. When she told her obstetrician that she planned to breast feed, he responded that she "didn't have the right personality for it, too educated," she wrote in a statement for the Jewish Women's Archive.

Her doctor assumed that she would follow his advice and prescribed a laxative that she inadvertently passed on to her son through her breast milk. He nearly died.

"He recovered, but in one sense I did not, for I would never again trust a doctor blindly," Seaman wrote in her 2003 book "The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth."

By the early 1960s, she was a health columnist for such magazines as Brides and Ladies' Home Journal. The first oral contraceptives were on the market, and Seaman was inundated with questions from readers who were experiencing distressing side effects. Her answers formed the beginning of her book and helped push for lower-estrogen versions of the pill that later became available.

"I just started out to try and give women plain facts that would help them to make their own decisions and not have to rely on authority figures," Seaman said in a 2003 interview with Women's eNews. "I didn't start out to be a muckraker."

Her books included "Free and Female" (1972), which addressed women's sexuality; "Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones" (1977), written with her second husband, psychiatrist Gideon Seaman; and "The No-Nonsense Guide to Menopause," co-written with Laura Eldridge, to be published later this year.

One writing project stood apart, a 1987 biography of "Valley of the Dolls" author Jacqueline Susann called "Lovely Me." Seaman said she was drawn to her subject because she saw Susann as an advocate for women's rights who operated within the prism of popular culture.

Seaman was born Sept. 11, 1935, in New York City, the eldest of three daughters of Henry and Sophie Rosner.

She credited her passion for social justice to her father, a public welfare administrator, and her affinity for writing to her mother, a high school English teacher.

At Ohio's Oberlin College, Seaman received a bachelor's degree in history in 1956. While completing a fellowship in advanced science writing at Columbia University in 1968, she started working on her birth-control book.

Seaman was married and divorced three times.

In addition to her son, she is survived by two daughters, Elana Seaman and Shira Seaman; sisters Jeri Drucker and Elaine Rosner-Jeria; and four grandchildren.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

Answered Prayers

There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

St. Theresa of Jesus


Well, I got my New York Times obituary of Barbara Seaman. I don't like it. It's pretty nasty, and they go out of their way to acknowledge her critics.

NYTImes: Barbara Seaman, 72, Dies; Cited Risks of the Pill

There's more criticism of Barbara Seaman in one page than is contained in all three pages of the obituary for the loathesome William F. Buckley, which is headlined: "He elevated conservatism to the center of American political discourse." Elevated? He wanted people with AIDS to be tattooed. Please. Multisyllabic does not equal smart or revolutionary, both of which are apt descriptions for Barbara Seaman.

Here are the passages in the Times obituary I object to; my comments are italicized.

Ms. Seaman’s first book, “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill” (P. H. Wyden), was considered groundbreaking when it was published in 1969. [emphasis added]

It wasn't just "considered" groundbreaking; it WAS groundbreaking.

Though the publication of “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill” made Ms. Seaman an enduring heroine of the women’s movement, her work did not find favor everywhere. As some reviewers saw it, Ms. Seaman’s passionate polemic sometimes got the better of scientific argument.

Writing in The Washington Post in 2003, Liza Mundy reviewed “The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women,” about the potential risks of hormone-replacement therapy:

“Seaman is a conspiracy theorist by temperament and training,” Ms. Mundy wrote. “In her presentation, every drug company is working against the interests of its patients, and every journalist who fails to question this or that bad study has probably been bought off; she uses the phrase ‘organized medicine’ in what seems a direct echo of ‘organized crime.’ ”

While it may be true that Ms. Mundy wrote that, it is irrelevant. As usual, Barbara Seaman was right. Drug companies are not nonprofits; they are concerned with sales and spreadsheets, not with health. Many doctors today are glorified pill-pushers who do what they have to do to get paid by insurance companies. The press HAS been bought off; the giant media conglomerates are concerned with their bottom lines, and one of their greatest advertisers is the pharmaceutical industry. That's why Barbara Seaman kept getting fired from magazines for speaking the truth.

The truth about HRT, the subject of Seaman's book in Mundy's review, is that HRT raises the incidence of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and dementia in women taking this dangerous cocktail. The Times obituary does not address the health risks of HRT or the fact that research has borne out Ms. Seaman's criticisms of HRT.

In the 1990s, Ms. Seaman also began to speak out publicly against domestic violence, from which she said she had suffered during her marriage to Mr. Forman. Though she did not identify Mr. Forman by name in the news media, court records show that in 1988 he was arrested and charged with assault after Ms. Seaman accused him of punching her in the face. The criminal case against Mr. Forman was later thrown out, Dudley Gaffin, his lawyer at the time, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Reached by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Forman denied having assaulted Ms. Seaman, calling the accusation of assault “a divorce tactic” on her part.

What could better demonstrate society's attitude towards domestic violence than the New York Times seeking out the batterer for a denial quote? Because even in death, Barbara Seaman, feminist pioneer, cannot be believed. And you can't get a fresh quote from her, now can you. But you can smear her a little in her own obituary. This is really disgusting.

Final thought: The obituary from the site Dog Flu Diet & Diseases is better.

Dog Flu Diet & Diseases: Female Reproductive Health Advocate Dies At 72

Wall St. Journal: REMEMBRANCES
Barbara Seaman (1935 – 2008)
Advocate for Women's Health Care, She Agitated to Make the Pill Safer

The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH): Barbara Seaman, Oberlin grad, women's health pioneer

RIP Barbara Seaman (Updated)

Power Surge: Interview with Barbara Seaman
Exploding The Estrogen Myth

Barbara Seaman's book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, and her later book about hormone replacement therapy, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, her later books about DES, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, and hormone replacement therapy, The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women, were seminal feminist tracts. My copies were dog-eared because I was always lending them to friends who were considering the pill or HRT. She was right on about both: huge experiments by the male medical community, where healthy women were given untested and experimental drugs for perfectly natural conditions that were not illnesses. A woman who needs birth control is not sick. A woman experiencing the symptoms of menopause is not "ill"; she is experiencing part of life.

Barbara Seaman was fired from almost every magazine she ever wrote for, when the pharmaceutical companies threatened to pull advertising if her work was published. She was a real feminist pioneer. Not surprisingly, the corporate media is ignoring the death of this influential feminist. As of the time of the post, only 8 media outlets have published the AP an obituary of Seaman.

She will be missed.

HuffPo: Leora Tanenbaum
Your Pill is Safer Because of Her

HuffPo: Jennifer Baumgardner
Remembering Barbara Seaman

TPM Cafe: Let us remember Barbara Seaman, crusading pioneer of the women's health movement

Chesler Chronicles: An Elegy For My Friend "Babz," aka Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) (a tribute by another feminist writer, Phyllis Chesler, the author of Women and Madness)

Newsday: Barbara Seaman, women's health advocate, dead at 72

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Remembering Barbara Seaman

Women'sSpace: “Dear Injurious Physician” — In Memorium: Barbara Seaman, Sept. 11, 1935-Feb. 27, 2008

UPDATE: As of 10:00 a.m. on Friday, only two additional corporate media outlets have published an obituary of Barbara Seaman: the Washington Post (and not just the AP obit, they wrote their own) and the Philadelphia Daily News. Is the corporate media ignoring the death of this feminist pioneer to keep their pharmaceutical advertisers happy? I emailed the NYTimes last night lamenting their lack of an obit, and got a form email in response, but neither the Times, the Boston Globe, nor the LATimes reports on Seaman's death today. Shame.

UPDATE 2: Updated to correct my mistake in confusing Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones with The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women.