In 2002, thanks to soccer star David Beckham, the world was introduced to the “metrosexual.” Two years later, and with less mainstream-media attention, we got our first exposure to “Intersex.”
Intersex is not some new perversion or a weird combination of science fiction and pornography. It is an unfortunate condition that is affecting freshwater fish all over the developed world. It occurs when fish of one sex also exhibit sexual characteristics of the other sex.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In 2004, for example, researchers on the Potomac River, downstream from Washington, D.C., found large-mouth bass that in most respects were males, but who had eggs in their sexual organs. Quite often when this happens to fish, they find themselves unable to reproduce. When it happens primarily to male fish, the fish population in general suffers.
The cause of intersexuality among fish, scientists speculate, is pollution in the water, particularly hormones. Why don’t we have more outcries about hormones, and campaigns to save the fish populations? Why aren’t environmentalists lobbying on Capitol Hill to keep these chemicals from being dumped into our rivers?
Maybe because the source of these chemicals is not some corporate polluter, but something a little more dear to the Left: human birth-control pills, morning-after pills, and abortion pills.
The environmentalists’ silence on this topic and their willful distortions when they do talk about it show how, for many of them, the environment is more a tool for advancing favored policies than a real cause in itself.
As I demonstrate in
The Really Inconvenient Truths, by any standard typically used by environmentalists, the pill is a pollutant. It does the same thing, just worse, as other chemicals they call pollution.
But liberals have gone to extraordinary lengths in order to stop consideration of contraceptive estrogen as a pollutant. When Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency launched its program to screen environmental estrogens (a program required under the Food Quality Protection Act), the committee postponed considering impacts from contraceptives. Instead, it has decided to screen and test only “pesticide chemicals, commercial chemicals, and environmental contaminants.” When and if it considers the impacts from oral contraceptives, the Agency says that its consideration will be limited because pharmaceutical regulation is a Food and Drug Administration concern.
As a result, the EPA’s program will focus all energies on the smallest-possible part of endocrine exposure in the environment and the lowest-risk area. If regulators did screen for estrogen from contraceptives or for estrogen from plants (phytoestrogens), these two sources would dwarf the impact of pesticides and other chemicals.
These findings would highlight the fact that low-level exposure to commercially related endocrine disruptors is relatively insignificant, a fact that would undermine the agency’s ability to regulate commercial products on the allegation that they are a significant source of endocrine disruption.
So government bureaucrats, the enforcement wing of liberal environmentalism, officially refuse to do anything about the contraceptive pollution issue in the United States. All this is in marked contrast to the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency, which at least has the decency to label the contraceptive pill a pollutant, even though it appears powerless or unwilling to do anything about it.
