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 Friday, January 09, 2009

Vatican Cites Environmentalist Objections to the Pill

By Diana Hsieh @ 12:03 AM

Reposted from Politics without God, as yet another indication of the coming merger of religion and environmentalism:

Another news item of interest from the iFeminists news feed:
Vatican newspaper slams 'the pill'
January 4, 2009

The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said on Saturday.

The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report. "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further. "We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers," added Castellvi.

The article was promptly dismissed by several organisations. "Once metabolised, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones," said Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association, quoted by the ANSA news agency. The hormones contained in the pill such as oestrogen "are present everywhere... in plastic, in disinfectants, in meat that we eat," added Flavia Franconi, of the Society of Italian Pharmacology. ...
The alliance between capitalism and religion in the 20th century in America was artifact of the rise of atheistic communism. It's not a sustainable union: a religious worldview cannot ground the rights of the individual to pursue his own happy life by his own rational judgment as required by capitalism. (On that point, see Ayn Rand's essay "Faith and Force" in Philosophy: Who Needs It.) More particularly, the Christian scriptures preach disdain for this world, blind obedience to the whims of God, abject sacrifice for the sake of the poor and weak, acceptance of sin, the positive value of suffering, and the moral corruption of wealth. A person who takes those values seriously cannot preach or practice capitalism. (See this LTE and this one.)

Consequently, I'm not surprised to see supposedly "conservative" religious institutions abandon their marginal respect for individual rights in favor of statist causes like the welfare states and environmentalism. Of course, the Catholic Church has never been a defender of individual rights, particularly not reproductive rights. But its embrace of environmentalist arguments to further that end is something new -- and ominous.

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 Comments

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 1:24:48 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Michael Labeit
E-mail: logician169(at)yahoo.com
URL: http://unit-perspective.blogspot.com

Christopher Hitchens has made it a point to critique the religious, especially Catholics, on their birth control policy. Its one of his better hours.

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 1:40:30 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Michael Labeit
E-mail: logician169(at)yahoo.com
URL: http://unit-perspective.blogspot.com

I almost forgot - thanks for the Olist approval, fussy complaints to management and all.

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 5:39:10 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Wendy

I'm mostly horrified that the Vatican has the nerve to publish something in the name of science. Stick to your mythology and fantasy, and don't try to talk about a world you're unqualified to live in!

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 7:51:21 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Daniel
URL: http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com


Yet another reason the reductio ad absurdum argument should be used sparingly...

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 10:23:04 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Thomas Shoebotham
E-mail: celloshoe(at)yahoo.com

"It's not a sustainable union..."

Is there any environmentalist pun in there somewhere?

Friday, January 9, 2009 at 21:50:37 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog

Yes, Thomas, that "sustainable union" was a deliberate choice of words!

Saturday, January 10, 2009 at 12:27:11 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Richard Watts
E-mail: rw1963(at)earthlink.net

I hope the Church's position on this will serve to discredit the Church, rather than to win support for their stance.

Saturday, January 10, 2009 at 22:23:57 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Anthony Mirvish
E-mail: amirvish(at)hotmail.com

Iain Murray, who is a secular, small-government researcher who writes on science raised this point in his recent book "Really Inconvenient Truths", a critique of many aspects of modern environmentalism. Murray tends to focus more on global warming and other more obvioius examples of environmentalism than the issue of synthetic estrogen in the environment. In any event, it is not merely the Catholic Church that has raised this point. The merits of the science should be the deciding point and dismissing the topic on the grounds that because the Church sees fit to cash in on this to justify its own policies on birth control is illogical. Murray noted that the politics of the issue have generally discouraged research on it because feminists (in particular) dislike the implications.

It is a fact that male fertility, testosterone and even birth rates (I believe) have declined over the last 40+ years in the industrialized world. Some researchers have stated that chemicals in the plastics now widely used in products like baby bottles have contributed. Others have noted sex mutations in various animal species (e.g. frogs) and linked it to the synthetic estrogen and hormones associated with, amongst other things, birth control pills. The rational course of action is to investigate the merits of the claims.

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