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Stacia Smith
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FAU Hosts Barbara Seaman to Discuss Her Book The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth

BOCA RATON, FL (February 23, 2005) - A pioneer in women's health advocacy and a renowned journalist, Barbara Seaman will speak at Florida Atlantic University's Boca Raton campus on Friday, March 4 at noon in the Administration Building's Board of Trustees Room, 777 Glades Road. The lecture and book signing, which are free and open to the public, are part of Women's History Month events at FAU.

Seaman has been hailed as one of the heroines of the women's health movement. She started writing in the 1960s for small women's magazines about the dangers of the Pill and in 1969, published her first book, The Doctors' Case against the Pill. The book, which showed that the Pill posed risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and stroke, shook up the medical establishment and led to Congressional hearings in 1970. After the hearings, birth control pills carried warning labels, and the Federal Drug Administration allowed input from women as part of the drug's regulation. The Hite Report on the Family called her "one of the most influential women in the twentieth-century women's movement."

Seaman's latest book The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth looks at the dangers of hormonal medicines and the unethical ways they are tested and sold to women. "[Hormones] have been used, in the main, for what doctors and scientists hope or believe they can do, not for what they know the products can do," said Seaman in the book. She contends that hundreds of millions of women have been used as lab animals in the trial of hormones. Seaman was vindicated to some extent when, in 2002, a five-year study of the synthetic estrogen Prempro showed that the hormones increased the risk of invasive breast cancer and cardiovascular disease at a rate that outweighed benefits.

The lecture is presented by the Women's Studies Program in FAU's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. Other upcoming lectures for Women's History Month include "Race and Gender: Roots and Routes in Rosario Ferre and Olga Nolla" on Monday, March 14 at noon and "Patients and Politics: The Women's Health Movement and U.S. Health Care" on Tuesday, March 15 at 4 p.m. For further information about the lectures or the Women's Studies Program at FAU, please call 561-297-3865.

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