Over at Mother Jones, Keira Butler debunks a pro-life group’s weird ploy to convince greenies that the birth control they take is causing problems for fish and otters, who have to deal with extra estrogen in waterways. Good luck debunking that myth; it’s been around forever, and I hear it from as many self-identified progressives as I do from conservatives.
The truth is, of course, that industrial sources, especially big agriculture, are the biggest source of estrogen in waterways. There’s always a similar argument to be made when some object to the fact that compact fluorescent bulbs contain mercury; for starters, you cannot break the cfl’s, and, secondly, power plants emit mercury and release it into the environment, so using less efficient incandescent bulbs releases that toxin into the environment in larger amounts than cfl’s would. It’s hard to make that intuitive, though. In the opposite way, estrogen in waterways seems intuitively connected to birth-control pills, though, thankfully, the idea that birth control is bad for the environment is not widespread.
— Monica Potts
