Barbara Seaman, central figure in women's health movement

BARBARA SEAMAN (Henry Grossman/file 2007)

WASHINGTON - Barbara Seaman, a writer and activist who challenged the safety of hormone replacement therapy and early oral contraceptives and became a central figure in the women's health movement, died Feb. 27 at her home in Manhattan of lung cancer. She was 72.

The health movement of the 1970s urged women to educate themselves about their bodies and demand more control over their medical care. Mrs. Seaman helped shepherd the movement by raising important, often overlooked questions about adequate testing for drugs.

She was also credited with helping to create the concept of patients' rights, particularly informed consent, and proper warning labels on drugs.

Over time, she proved correct about the dangers of high doses of the female hormone estrogen in the earliest oral contraceptives. She also denounced hormone replacement therapy, which for decades was promoted as a magic bullet to keep menopausal women young and sexy.

Her books included "The Doctors' Case Against the Pill" (1969), which triggered congressional hearings into the safety of oral contraceptives, and "The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women" (2003), an exposé of hormone replacement therapy.

In 1975, Mrs. Seaman cofounded the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy and watchdog group in Washington that worked to eliminate quotas for women in medical schools and give women the right to information about medical treatments.

Mrs. Seaman was among the first to question using hormone treatments to address symptoms of menopause, decades before the Women's Health Initiative released its long-term study in 2002 showing that such regimens significantly increase the risk of stroke and breast cancer.

Vivian Pinn, a pathologist who directs the National Institutes of Health's Office of Research on Women's Health, said that Mrs. Seaman felt vindicated by the Women's Health Initiative study, for which she was an unofficial consultant.

"She was an advocate who challenged anyone she needed to challenge, including me, and recognized the importance of science" - not just ideology - "in responding to questions she raised," Pinn said.

Mrs. Seaman was a self-described muckraker whose polemical language and approach were sometimes considered distractions by reviewers of her books. She invoked Nazi medical experiments when confronting pharmaceutical companies, the Food and Drug Administration, and others in the position to research, market, and approve hormone drugs for women.

Mrs. Seaman said her tone was justified because she had marshaled evidence that the pharmaceutical industry suppressed or ignored negative clinical studies of their products.

She said she saw transcripts of meetings between contraceptive manufacturers and clinical researchers who knew of women's deaths that possibly resulted from the pill but who joked about tight girdles causing the fatal blood clotting. Mrs. Seaman said she never took birth control pills.

Among Mrs. Seaman's early targets was Robert Wilson, a gynecologist whose best-selling book "Feminine Forever" (1966) described hormone therapy as a cure for what he called women's "deficiency disease."

Wilson, whose book was funded secretly by an estrogen manufacturer, said women taking estrogen at 50 could "still look attractive in sleeveless dresses or tennis shorts."

Mrs. Seaman responded, "How do you know that it isn't from the tennis?"

Barbara Ann Rosner was born Sept. 11, 1935, in New York, where her father was assistant commissioner of social services. Her mother taught high school English.

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1956, she started writing and editing for women's magazines. She was a columnist for the Ladies' Home Journal in the late 1960s when she began receiving letters from readers concerned about blood clots, heart attack, depression and other serious medical conditions after taking oral contraceptives.

"I started finding out very early on that the patients taking the pill didn't agree with the doctors that it was perfectly safe and simple and wonderful," Mrs. Seaman said. "The early pills had 10 times the amount of hormones they have now. They were a massive overdose."

She interviewed doctors and officials at health organizations for her first book, "The Doctors' Case Against the Pill," considered by many a landmark text that led Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, to hold hearings in 1970 about the safety of oral contraceptives.

But Mrs. Seaman and other activists said they were appalled not only by the lack of female witnesses but also by testimony from one doctor that "estrogen is to cancer what fertilizer is to wheat." Feminists disrupted the hearings in protest.

Public outcry from the hearings stimulated research to find safer drugs, as well as drug label warnings. By the 1980s, manufacturers in the United States drastically lowered estrogen doses in oral contraceptives; they had been reduced years earlier in Britain.