Wayne Laugesen writing for the National Catholic Register has an excellent article on hormone pollution due to contraceptives. My readers will not be surprised at this statement from an environmentalist.
“You can’t have a zero impact, and this is one of the many, many impacts we have on the environment in everyday life,” Georgis said. “Nobody is to blame for this, and I don’t have a solution.”
Then this comment from George Harden, a board member of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, based in Steubenville, Ohio.
“If you’re killing mosquitoes to save people from the West Nile virus, you can count on secular environmentalists to lay down in front of the vapor truck, claiming some potential side effect that might result from the spray,” Harden said. “But if birth control deforms fish – backed by the proof of an EPA study – and threatens the drinking supply, mum will be the word.”
Harden said the growing knowledge of estrogen-polluted water may expose the cultural double-standards that protect birth control from the scrutiny given to other chemicals and drugs.
“It’s going to start looking funny,” Harden said. “The radical environmentalist won’t eat a corn chip if the corn contacted a pesticide. But they view it a sacred right and obligation to consume synthetic chemicals that alter a woman’s natural biological functions, even if this practice threatens innocent aquatic life downstream.”
Despite growing and nationwide knowledge of birth-control pollution in rivers and streams, leading environmentalists remain unfazed – even in Boulder, where it’s been known about for years.
The whole article is very good.
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I am reminded of the thought/vison I had years ago after seeing used condums (yeah, I meant to spell “condums”) on the road while walking to the bus, that we might just kill ourselves by used condums covering the whole surface of the earth & not allowing anything to grow.
On January 25th of this year, my pastor wrote what is below and it is published on several sites on the internet.
A Modest Proposal for Cleaning up the Planet
by Fr. Paul Weinberger
The Dallas Morning News recently ran a wire story about companies in this country which have tainted the rivers with mercury. It was a short item that reminded me of other environmental problems. Recall the demands made on EXXON to pay for the cleanup after the Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Considerthat when you buy new tires there is a charge for recycling the old ones. The same goes for freon in the car’s A/C. Americans buy tires and gas; they have A/C in their cars. They�ve heard about mercury in fish. (Who wants to eat seafood, a secular sacrament today, tainted by mercury dumped by industry?)Not a whole lot is needed to getfolks online to address these types of environmental pollution.
Another recent news story told about doctors who believe the oral contraceptivepill needs to be strengthened. Evidently some women are still getting pregnant. But what happens when oral contraceptives get into the water supply? Countless studies show fish and frogs have mutated due to the pill which reaches rivers and lakes though waste water treatment facilities. The female hormones make frogs disfigured, some growing extra legs (the French will love this!) and the fish have the equivalent of a sex-change from male to female
How are pharmaceutical companies any different from clear cut coal miners who level whole mountains, clogging streams and rivers with valuable topsoil? What if the companies which manufacture oral contraceptives had to pass on a surcharge to women for environmental cleanup? Public awareness would be raised and people would demand tighter restrictions on what goes into our lakes and rivers.Our tender planet must be protected. Let�s get the ecologists to call on pharmaceutical companies to clean up their act.
The very same arguments could be used if Planned Parenthood and other abortionists are found dumping into the municipal water supply the bodies of aborted children which have passed through a �disposal� at the clinic. Make them pay for their environmental pollution.
If these measures were successful they would make the costs of chemical contraception and abortion go up, up, and up. Recall how mobster Al Capone was finally put away on charges of tax evasion? It didn’t kill him but itsure slowed him down.
Maybe this is why I’m moody all the time…
I wonder how much of that estrogen we end up ingesting from drinking from the public water supply. Maybe that explains “metrosexuals”.
In a more serious note, a few years ago I read this article on how women who worked the night shift had an increased risk of development breast cancer. The rationale was that low exposure to sunlight and increased artificial light exposure increased the estrogen levels enough to increase the risk. Notice how hormone levels were not high enough to prevent ovulation like the pill does. Yet, our society insists that there is absolutely no risk from the birth control pill. With all the cries out there about the influence of “Big Oil”, “Big Tobacco”, etc., when are we going to hear about the influence of “Big Sex”?
To (probably mis)quote Monty Python,”Come see the injustice inherent in the system!”
I love it when liberal causes collide. Birth control vs. environmentalism–just pull up a chair and watch the hypocrisy sputtering like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.
Remember, not just a XchildX deformed fish, but a wanted XchildX deformed fish.
…did not know how to get a strike line through child.
“and the fish have the equivalent of a sex-change from male to female”
Hmmm…As some feminist agendas go…Never mind.
Endocrine distruptors are a hot topic amongst the drinking water industry, and pharmaceuticals are very difficult to remove with current treatment technologies. If modern sewage treatment technology can’t remove the drugs, what makes people think that conventional water treatment can remove the same chemicals?
This should be the real concern, what is it doing to human beings in drinking water?
A couple years back, I worked on a project for a consulting firm for the EPA looking at emerging water pollutants. The estrogen/progesterone derivatives were one of THE major categories of pollutants. As another poster mentioned, our current sewage treatment facilities do not adequately remove these hormones. Furthermore, several species of fish are extremely sensitive to these kind of hormonal disruptions. It is unclear what the effect on humans is – it would seem that the levels are probably too low to have much of an effect, but we will probably never get any good data.
Or, Bill, the used “condums” in the ocean/rivers/ponds will kill the fish, which will lead to the death of certain birds, which will…
“Nobody is to blame…”
Uh-huh.
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