June 10, 2009 at 2:26 am (The Pill)
One of the key researchers who invented the contraceptive pill – 85 year-old Carl Djerassi of Austria – said the invention has caused a “demographic catastrophe.”
A personal commentary published in an Austrian newspaper laments that Europe’s demographic decline is a “horror scenario” brought about by the Pill’s invention. Djerassi writes that in Europe now, there is “no connection between sexuality and reproduction.” He wrote that young Austrians who fail to have children are committing national suicide.
In a seperate article, a leading medical expert said the Pill has brought about “devastating ecological effects” by releasing “tons of hormones” into the environment, which has lead to a decrease in male fertility.
Djerassi was one of three researchers whose formulation of the synthetic progestagen, Norethisterone, marked a key step in the creation of the first oral contraceptive pill.
In his essay, Djerassi called the falling birthrate in Europe an “epidemic” far worse than obesity, which has received much more attention. He said: “This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete.”
Dr. Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, speaking to the Catholic News Agency, pointed out the “devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the Pill.”
Source: Catholic News Agency and CathNews.com
Originally printed in the March/April 2009 edition of Family Foundations magazine, page 6.
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June 10, 2009 at 2:24 am (The Pill)
Millions of women in the United States ingest excess estrogen every day in the form of birth control pills. Within 24 hours, the effluent from those 12 million doses ends up in our sewage systems. And then?
The April 17 Scientific American reported results of a study warning that “many streams, rivers and lakes already bear warning signs that the fish caught within them may also be carrying enough chemicals that mimic the female hormone estrogen to cause breast cancer cells to grow.”
“Fish are really a sentinel, just like canaries in the coal mine 100 years ago,” says Conrad Volz, co-director of exposure assessment at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Center for Environmental Ecology. “We need to pay attention to chemicals that are estrogenic in nature, because they find their way back into the water we all use.”
According to the Freshwater Institute’s Fisheries and Oceans section, “The potent synthetic estrogens excreted by women taking hormone replacement therapy or birth control pills are not completely broken down in the sewage treatment process and are discharged into waterways.”
While cautioning that the exact process of hormonal confusion is not yet clear, the Scientific Americanarticle continued, “But the [estrogenic] effects on the fish themselves were clear: the gender of nine of the fish [tested] could not be determined.”
“Increased estrogenic active substances in the water are changing males so that they are indistinguishable from females,” Volz found. “There are eggs in male gonads as well as males are secreting a yolk sac protein. Males aren’t supposed to be making egg stuff.”
This article originally published in the California Catholic Daily, April 29, 2007
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