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Don’t drink the water

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We’ve visited this issue before. Seems new concerns about birth control pill hormones leaking into the water supply have again arisen:

Experts believe the hormone could be getting into drinking water and affecting men’s sperm counts. They say sewage treatment does not remove the chemical entirely from drinking supplies, although the water industry insists there is no evidence of a risk to health….

One study by the Medical Research Council found that Scottish men born since 1970 are 25 per cent less fertile than those born 20 years earlier – and that fertility is continuing to drop by two per cent a year.

Of course, other chemicals may be responsible, for we are increasingly discovering that we are surrounded by ‘gender-bending’ substances.

Many pesticides and plastics, for example, contain chemicals that disrupt the hormone system. (emphasis mine)

And it seems going ahead with broad water filtration programs is out of the question since the process of filtering these chemicals out of the water contributes to global warming. (Good grief!) So buy your water today… in glass bottles, I guess.

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Andrea adds: All these environmental crises, economic crises, everything is a CRISIS! The average guy is going to reach for something in a bottle and it won’t be water. I think I need a drink too.

Oh dear, which one wins?

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Reproductive choice or environmentalism? How does a progressive mind choose between the two? Another news story about the effects of hormones on males:

Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.

There are many bad things in the environment besides female hormones from contraceptive pills. If you read the whole story, you’ll find lots to be afraid of. But my question remains: If the choice is between continuing the use the Pill and demasculinizing fish, which one will we choose?

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Andrea corrects Brigitte: Oh dear, Brigitte, you should know this by now. “Women’s rights”, especially “women’s reproductive rights”, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined are THE trump card. Of course they win. The fish don’t stand a chance. (Unless this damages female fish too. In which case, this remains an open question. Hmmmm.)

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Rebecca is enlightened enough to realize there is no problem, since gender is a social construct: if the fish were secure in their own identity and not marginalized by a phallocentric hegemonistic culture, they would not mind feminising effects.

When is pollution not pollution?

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Intelligent discussion about the environment and pollution can be hard to find. I find the loudest voices on both sides of the “are we headed for ecological armageddon?” debate to be noisy and poorly read in basic statistics. There’s a lot to be said for maintaining the environment, especially in places like Canada, where open spaces are abundant and incredibly beautiful, but it takes a pretty hard heart to ask Indians and Chinese to do without heating and basic transportation for the sake of a theoretical reduction in world temperatures of .8 degrees several decades in the future.

Here is an issue of pollution and a threat to wildlife that’s worth more discussion than it’s getting.  The hormones in birth control pills (used also in the morning-after pill and some abortion inducing drugs, but because of sheer volume, it’s really about birth control pills) end up excreted into sewage, and make their way, despite all the treatments meant to neutralize human waste, into the water, well, everywhere.  This is devastating some fish populations.  If an oil refiner were releasing a substance into the water that had similar effects, we’d hear of nothing else, and be encouraged to boycott the producers, call for new oil taxes, lobby for new laws, and so on.

It’s no secret that the hard core environmental lobby are in favour of Zero Population Growth, where they don’t favour reducing the population.  The most common and reliable birth control method (in the developed world, anyway) pollutes the environment.  Will Greenpeace or similar have the intellectual honesty to call for a new look at birth control and our reliance on synthetic hormones to manipulate nature?  Many people have spoken out about hormonal manipulation of livestock and its effects both on humans and animals.  Why the silence here?

By all means, we (humanity) need some method of birth control that is safe and effective.  There is a lot about the pill that is politically attractive: it is, used properly, very effective, it is entirely within the purview of the woman involved, which meshes well with the reality of the hook-up culture, it’s marketed for all sorts of trivial things that make it even more appealing (want to have only four periods a year? want to clear up your acne? try the Pill!) and it makes drug companies a ton of money.  But there are increasing reasons to think that it’s not very safe.  If it’s not safe for wildlife to be exposed to these hormones indirectly, maybe we’ll finally start to look at how healthy it is for the women who ingest it daily.

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