Non-biodegradable estrogen – from artificial contraception pills, consumed daily by tens of millions of women – is making its way through sewage treatment plants and severely pollutes our waterways with chilling consequences—including male infertility, liver cancer, breast cancer, and uterine cancer. That means that other pharmaceuticals are also making their way into our water supply. Don’t believe it? Google it.
I remember reading a government study (yes, I’ll try to find it again) that stated that estrogen from ‘the pill’ had made its way into our drinking water. Yes, there are other contributing factors, but birth control pills are mainly to blame.
Lovely…
The author of the column below, Matthew Hanley, M.P.H., was an HIV/AIDS technical advisor for Catholic Relief Services from 2001 to 2008. He is the author of the forthcoming book Avoiding Risk, Affirming Love: What the West Can Learn from Africa, to be published by The National Catholic Bioethics Center in 2009.
Full column here, bits below.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar reacted to an August report that emissions from coal-fired power plants have led to widespread mercury pollution in our rivers and streams by saying: “this science sends a clear message that our country must continue to confront pollution, restore our nation’s waterways, and protect the public from potential health dangers.” Who, after all, wants toxic levels of mercury in our rivers?
But mercury is not all there is in the water. Estrogen – from artificial contraception pills, consumed daily by tens of millions of women – makes its way through sewage treatment plants and severely pollutes our waterways. Classified in the United Kingdom as a pollutant, “the pill” has led – according even to the Austrian chemist who helped invent it – to “demographic catastrophe”. The oversaturation of estrogen in the environment likely contributes to male infertility, which has been rising in recent years; there is also the impact it has on aquatic life.
To take one recent example, University of Colorado scientists found that of the 123 fish they had caught at a nearby mountain stream for research purposes, “101 were female, 12 were male and 10 were strange ‘intersex’ fish with male and female features.” The director of the Colorado Genetic Engineering Action Network, Dave Georgis, reacted to these freaky findings by saying: “Nobody is to blame for this, and I don’t have a solution.”
That, no doubt, would be above his pay grade.
Connecting the dots is a straightforward but thankless task. Anyone who is aware of ever having preferred darkness to light knows that truth can irritate before it illuminates. Indicting the tools of consequence-free sex as the culprit in environmental degradation, much less personal or social disintegration, is to court rage.
In this case, ’roid rage, since oral contraceptives are steroids (yes, think Mark McGwire), though few know it – and carcinogenic ones at that. To “work,” they must first interfere with the liver, which normally breaks down ingested substances; they are specifically designed not to biodegrade – which helps explain estrogen’s presence in the environment, and why they are implicated not only in breast cancer, but also liver cancer.
