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1. Not only the pill and most drugs and our cosmetics pollute the environment. The Church should encourage the use of nature's remedies like herbs for health, not only to save the poor but also to bring back the appreciation of our Creator's medicine.

   Posted By: sebastian liew

2. It is comments like this that will consistently make the Church look as if it is full of ill-informed people. When I read this article, I asked myself how relevant is the Church in my life and I have to say God is relevant - Church isn't and until those in the Vatican stop destroying it with poor comments, it won't be. Sad on the back of WYD

   Posted By: Stanley Caine

3. Oh! those dastardly women are causing mischief again. Not content with promoting gender equality NOW they are the cause of male infertility!!!
   Perhaps it may have been best to let them have inclusive language and female ordination and then they may have left the men to procreate in peace.

   Posted By: anniec

4. Ha, Ha Annie.
   
   Who has their knickers in a knot that the Vatican is simply repeating what is already known.
   
   The hard truth is that God made women to bear children and be at the side of their husband and dissenting Catholics HATE artificial contraception beacuse it is an unnatural way to overcome what God intended for women.
   
   Maybe if you are so stupid as to believe in the heresy of women priests (where are the female Nuns anyway these days) then you should be back in the kitchen.

   Posted By: Ian

5. Hang on Stanley and Anniec. You appear to choose to believe one side of the report because it's convenient and so not the other. What evidence to you have to say the Vatican is wrong and Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association or Flavia Franconi (Pharmicist) are correct? Was any definitive accepted research presented by those gents? The tones of your letters show your bias as well.
   
   Most of the media is simiilarly biased against the Church and you ought to realise it instead of falling for it hook line and sinker. Instead ask the question, why does the Vatican hold the position and why wouldn't there be a worse problem simply because (Franconi says) hormones "are everywhere" already?

   Posted By: Chris Saidou

6. Stanley and Anniec, it seems you are the “ill-informed people” making “poor comments”.
   
   The fact that this is a major environmental and possibly human-health problem is well known in scientific circles, though hushed up for political reasons and rarely mentioned by environmental groups, or in the mass media, only to be quickly pooh-poohed by the Pill manufacturers, whose self-serving dismissals of concerns are taken as Gospel.
   
   See e.g.
   http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56623
   
   quote “While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills. … EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo…..they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city's sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange "intersex" fish with male and female features. It's "the first thing that I've seen as a scientist that really scared me," university biologist John Woodling told the Denver Post. ... Similar stories have been reported from coast to coast ... Shane Edwards writes, "To give this publicity would pit nature against consequence-free sex, and that just won't happen. But what disturbs me about this even more than the environmental impact (and the reality that this will NEVER be dealt with because of its political ramifications) is what this is doing to us. I mean, if these effects are happening with fish and frogs, what is happening to us?"”
   
   Sebastian: many drugs are in fact purified and standardised formulations of the cocktail of chemicals found in each herbal medicine. While raw herbs are of some use, pure drugs are much more effective and have relatively fewer side effects. And while they are used to treat only a relatively small number of sick people, pollution is not a major problem.
   
   The problem arises with the massive quantities of oral contraceptive pills used to “treat” millions of perfectly healthy women for the “disease” of natural fertility. Highly potent synthetic drugs designed to imitate natural hormones only far more powerful and given at a dose a hundred times stronger than the miniscule amounts naturally found in the body, to fool the body into thinking it’s already pregnant.
   
   The manufacturers will tell you it’s not a problem because the drugs are “broken down” in the liver. In fact they are not “broken down” into simple inert chemicals, the liver can’t do that with these drugs, it can only “conjugate” them – attach sugar molecules to make them more water soluble so that the kidneys can get rid of them faster. And every day just when the hard working liver and kidneys have managed to reduce the level of the drug, along comes another dose. And the conjugated drugs in the urine pass into the environment where the sugar is broken off and the drug has devastating effects on animals and even other humans.
   
   

   Posted By: Ronk

7. The facts do not support the theory that the birth control pill is a "non-negligible" contributor to male infertility. The estrogenic environment has been a concern for over a decade, and is thought to be largely caused by the hormone effects of plastic waste. Any estrogen that would be remaining in the environment from oral contraception pills would be negligible in comparison.

   Posted By: Maine Physician

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