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c h a p t e r s i x Enter the Feminists Informing Women about Estrogen Viewers who tuned in to the NBC Nightly News on Thursday, 4 December 1975, learned about the latest witnesses to be subpoenaed in the ongoing case of the kidnapping and murder of Jimmy Ho√a, reported missing four months earlier . Stories followed on a tax bill in the House of Representatives, a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA involvement in Chile, the retirement of longtime Republican Senator Hugh Scott, and November’s wholesale prices. The main news story that evening was President Ford’s visit to the People’s Republic of China. The president, along with his wife, his daughter Susan, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and two hundred news reporters, had arrived in Peking on the first of December. John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw reported on the final day of meetings between the Chinese and American leaders. After two commercials for microwave ovens and stories on Indonesian terrorists in the Netherlands and Israeli air raids on Lebanon, John Hart (sitting in for the regular anchorman, John Chancellor) reported from the New York studio that women who took estrogen ran five to fourteen times the chance of getting uterine cancer as women who did not. The segment included an interview in Los Angeles with Harry K. Ziel, coauthor of one of the New England Journal of Medicine articles. Ziel incriminated the Premarin brand of conjugated estrogens and then called for more research. Back in New York, Hart noted that the FDA would decide later in the month whether to increase restrictions on the use of estrogen.∞ NBC was the only network to pay significant attention to the estrogen-endometrial cancer discovery. ABC mentioned it just briefly, sandwiched between reports on over-the-counter sleep aids and an artificial sweetener.≤ Those who preferred the avuncular style of Walter Cronkite on CBS heard nothing about estrogen at all.≥ Readers of the New York Times that day saw, on the bottom right-hand corner of the front page, next to a triptych of photographs of First Lady Betty Ford dancing 110 The Estrogen Elixir at a Peking school, the headline, ‘‘Estrogen Is Linked to Uterine Cancer.’’∂ Continued on page 55, the article described the findings of the Seattle and Los Angeles studies, quoting from both Harry K. Ziel and Donald C. Smith, director of the Seattle study. It also gave a brief history of the rise in popularity of estrogen in the 1960s as a long-term replacement therapy, noting that ‘‘millions of women— particularly those in the upper socioeconomic brackets—have been using estrogens , not just during the months of menopausal discomfort, but for years afterward.’’∑ Since many American newspapers subscribed to the New York Times News Service, this story probably appeared widely across the country, although not necessarily on the front page. The next day, the Times health reporter Jane Brody wrote about her spot check of a dozen gynecologists around the country in the wake of the estrogen-endometrial cancer association. All claimed that the news would have little e√ect on their prescribing habits. Those who prescribed long-term estrogen replacement still believed the benefits outweighed the risks; those who limited estrogen use to short-term relief of menopausal symptoms continued to regard the medication as an important and necessary treatment for many women. Buried in the middle of the article, however, was an interesting revelation: most of the doctors said that ‘‘thepatientshouldparticipateintheevaluationofbenefitversusriskandthatsuch participation meant that the women must be told of the possible hazards of estrogen therapy.’’∏ Although this opinion may not have reflected those held by other American physicians, it did reflect a change in some doctors’ attitudes toward their patients. Over the next four years, nationally televised news broadcasts reported on selected scientific findings as they were released, particularly those that associated estrogen use with cancer. Local stations also got in on the act. For example, Channel 2 News, New York’s CBS a≈liate, ran a special ‘‘Survival Report’’ on 3 February 1976 called ‘‘Estrogen, Birth Control, and Menopause: Are You Taking the Bad with the Good?’’ In the first part of this two-night report, the news program sent its Washington correspondent to talk to women, doctors, and FDA o≈cials about estrogen therapy.π To attract viewers, the station ran a large advertisement that covered almost a quarter of a page in the New York Times.∫ The second part...

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