[Marxism] Let us remember Barbara Seaman

[Dbachmozart at aol.com]

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

By Ruth Rosen - 
TPM Cafe
February 28,  2008
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/28/let_us_remember_barbara_seaman
/#more

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.



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