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

St. Theresa of Jesus

Yesterday I posted a diary noting the passing of health writer Barbara Seaman.  In it I complained that the corporate media was ignoring her death.  I emailed the New York Times hoping they would see fit to pay tribute to this pioneering feminist (who BTW was a New Yorker). Well, today 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.

The diary, and my critique, are after the fold.

Barbara Seaman's 1969 book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, and 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:  these were all huge experiments by the (mostly) 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.  Even worse, women's concerns about the safety and efficacy of these largely untested prescription drugs were brushed aside.  

Politics is the art of compromise.  But there are compromises and there are compromises.  The Democrats in Congress are poised to vote to increase funding for abstinence programs, a multi-million dollar racket that takes federal money and puts it into the hands of religious crackpots.  All the research into these abstinence programs -- into which the Bush Administration has poured more than 1 billion dollars -- shows that they don't work.   So, in essence Congress enriches the Religious Right to fund their pet boondoggle.