To The Editor:
Jerry Seinfeld has a skit about airline attendants showing passengers how to buckle and unbuckle their seat belts. He then adds “This is for anyone who hasn’t been in a car since 1962.” For the most part I feel the same way about the article “A vow to do better for the earth God made” by William Patenaude on August 7, 2008. Anyone who hasn’t been asleep since 1962 has heard this all before. It is drummed into our children’s heads from the first day of pre-school. The three R’s have been replaced by reduce, reuse and recycle. Anyone with a teenager in the house knows that around the age of 13 they turn into the environmental police, making sure everyone is recycling properly. They must give a badge out at school for this. If we are going to have a discussion on Catholic ecology we need to add something new to the discussion or do it from a Catholic perspective. Why not discuss the harmful effects of the birth control pill on our environment. Here is an excerpt from an article by Donald Demarco titled “Girl Fish, Boy Fish, It Fish” from the “National Catholic Register” posted January 8, 2008.
“Let us consider one rather startling example: In 2005, The Denver Post reported a study that biologists John Woodling and David Norris carried out on trout in Colorado ’s Boulder Creek.
“The normal male-female ratio of these fish is 1 to 1. Woodling and Norris discovered that of the 123 that they randomly caught on four fishing expeditions (March and October 2002, September 2003, June 2004), there were 101 female, 12 male and 10 of such an unusual hybrid of male and female that researchers could not decide how they should be identified. Of 20 trout caught on May 7, 2002, in the South Platte River, 16 were female and 4 were identified as this curious “intersex.”
"The biologists traced this back to the hormones from the birth control pill (the birth control pill contains hormones up to 400 times the amount woman naturally have and the BCP hormones do not metabolize) and these hormones are making their way back into our water system.”
The contraceptive mentality leads to treating people like things. Overpopulation is a myth perpetrated by radical environmentalists who have shown no interest in NFP, which promotes healthy families and is also perfectly safe for the environment. Instead, they have adopted abortion and contraception as two pillars of their ideology, seeking to reduce the number of people along with the plastic bags. What is missing from their equation is the positive correlation between the generosity in family life and detachment from material goods.
I certainly don’t mean to trivialize the environmental movement because we do need to be good stewards of the earth. A healthy Catholic family leads to a healthy environment and this is a discussion that Catholic Ecology should be having because we won’t hear it from anywhere else.
Tricia Murray
East Greenwich
