Poisoning the well

Of the few dissenters who actually read Humanae Vitae when it was issued, most misunderstood the Pope’s warnings. He was not saying that God was going to punish us with bad outcomes because we disobey Him and use the Pill. Instead, the Pope said that because contraception itself violates the natural law, the consequences will inevitably be bad.

There are other consequences to the Pill that not even Paul VI could foresee, however. No one knew back then that those little tablets of synthetic hormones are actually carcinogenic, increasing women’s risk of many cancers. Nor did anyone imagine that these hormones would be excreted in women’s urine and find their way into our environment. For years, a handful of brave scientists have sounded the alarm about the freakish mutations occurring in wildlife near streams and rivers fed by estrogen-rich wastewater.

But fish and frogs aren’t the only creatures affected by the Pill; there is now copious evidence that the hormones have found their way into our drinking water and are causing serious health problems for human beings, too.  In addition to causing early onset of puberty in girls and cancer in women, multiple studies have now confirmed a solid link between prostate cancer in men and Pill use in women. Using data from 87 countries, researchers found that where the proportion of women using the Pill is higher, so are prostate cancer rates in men.

Professor Janet Smith says using contraception is like ingesting a little bit of poison in your orange juice each day: it may not harm you right away, but it’s still going to hurt you in the long run. When she made this analogy during her famous, “Contraception: Why Not?” speech in 1994, she likely never imagined the hormones she spoke about were literally poisoning not just contraceptive users, but the rest of us, too.

Contraception affects us all. The hormones from the Pill have gotten into our rivers and streams and are damaging the precious environment God has given us. It has poisoned our drinking water, causing serious health problems for women, men, and even children. For as long as we’ve had the Pill, the decision to use it has been touted as a private one that affects only the woman who uses it. Yet it is obvious that when one woman chooses to ingest these hormones, she also chooses for her husband, her children, her parents, her neighbors, and her coworkers to ingest them. She chooses for me, my husband, and my children to ingest them. It is painful to realize that despite my efforts to spare my own family the harmful effects of using hormonal contraception, we are all still likely to suffer the consequences as if we did.

Read the whole thing at Catholic Sistas.