Natural Family Planning International

In early January 2009, there was a brief flurry of headlines about the birth control pill as a major pollutant in the waterways of the Western countries. This has made headlines before, but the kicker in January was a report in La Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican. In that article, Pedro Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, reported that the Pill was having devastating effects on the environment. He also linked this to increasing male infertility. (Source: The Pill causes male infertility, says the Vatican, Simon Caldwell, MailOnline, 090106)

As one might expect, this was dismissed by some pharmaceutical organizations, saying that these hormones were distributed by other causes as well and were all over the place including plastics, disinfectants, and the meats we eat. One Italian scientist denied that the Pill had any characteristics of female hormones after it was metabolized. That assertion certainly seems open to challenge because the success of the Pill has been the fact that it does not break down as natural hormones do. It was engineered to resist being broken down so that it could be taken orally and still be effective after having been digested. Women have been urinating their natural female hormones since Eve, but it’s only been in recent years that these waste products have been feminizing the male fish.

I googled “Pill and environmental pollution” and got 48,200 responses. The Vatican statement was prominent in the first pages, but on page 5 of the search results I found a reference to a recent book, The Really Inconvenient Truths by Iain Murray published in 2008. You can read it online. Chapter 3 is titled “The Pill as Pollutant” and is helpful. Among other things, Murray describes what happened when the mountain streams near Boulder, Colorado were found to have these pollutants. Or it is better to say what didn’t happen. It appears that as soon as the liberals discovered that their favorite birth control mechanism was responsible or partially responsible for this, all of sudden they lost interest.

The article in the Vatican paper was based on a 100-page report with 300 bibliographic citations, but it was breezily dismissed by those who make money selling the Pill. Yes, there are other sources of overall pollution, but the question needs to be studied further. To what extent have the other possible sources been deliberately constructed so as to be resistant to normally breaking down as natural hormones do? And yes, it would be good to get rid of the contamination from the other sources, which may or may not be feasible. But one thing is certain. Any and all pollution caused by the Pill and its derivatives such as the Morning-after Pill, the Shot, implants, and hormone-laced IUDs can be completely eliminated by a ban on their manufacture. There are other ways to avoid pregnancy that do not pollute and that do not carry abortifacient properties.

And the best of all of these is Natural Family Planning, both systematic and ecological breastfeeding.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality