Christian theology puts a great deal of weight on the concept of "free will," for an understandable reason. After all, the concept of sin doesn't make much sense if God didn't give humans a free choice to sin or not to sin, and the concept of redemption also doesn't make as much sense if it's not a freely made choice, but coerced somehow from an all-powerful God. In the same universe of belief, Satan is known as the Prince of Lies, a character who tries to steal your freely made choices from you by lying and misrepresenting reality to you. In general, Christian theology comes down pretty hard on liars, making false witness one of the Big Ten No-Nos that right wingers are eager to slap onto monuments in every courthouse and schoolyard. This observation -- that lying is a form of coercion, an attempt to take away your free choice -- is one of the better things that Christianity has contributed to the world.
Why then, when it comes to reproductive rights, does the Vatican turn its back on millennia of teaching about the satanic nature of lying? It seems there's no deception in which the Vatican won't engage in their efforts to get women to bear children against their will. Already we have reason to believe that Catholic officials are lying to people about the effectiveness of condoms in order to convince them not to use condoms. And now the Vatican is using its authority to promote pseudo-scientific claims about the environmental dangers of the birth control pill.
Many of us are shielded from the silliness of these claims, realizing that the Catholic Church is a church, not a scientific organization. But sadly a number of people out there are willing to believe claims like this, made by the church, because they can't quite come around to believing that the Catholic Church is abusing its authority.
But abusing it they are.
The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report.
"We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further.
You've got to love how they added the dig about male infertility on top of the unscientific claims being falsely presented as science. That's a rather unsubtle way of exposing the Vatican's underlying tensions, especially the belief that female independence somehow damages men who are the "rightful" owners of female bodies.
The argument about the pill is one that's been popular with anti-choicers for a long time. After all, these are the same people who hold unscientific scientific beliefs that link breast cancer and abortion (disproven) and belive that fetuses sit around worrying about abortion. But the argument about the pill is based on a chain of assumptions that make less sense the more you delve. It's true that sperm counts in human males are down, and this may be related to the presence of environmental estrogen mimickers that have been linked to sexual and reproductive cancers, as well as diminishing fish populations. But the effects haven't been measured realistically in any way at all, and much more research is needed to prove this link. Even conceding that environmental estrogens are a problem, there's no reason to think that the birth control pill contributes, since (as an AP article notes), the estrogens are broken down by women's bodies before they expel waste.
More importantly, we do know that the majority of environmental estrogens are actually linked not to evil, evil sex, but actually to the more mundane act of eating. Most environmental estrogens come from pesticides and growth hormones given to cattle. If you're worried about it, look more to the hamburger on your plate than the pill pack in your medicine cabinet (though it is true that the plastic package on your birth control pills is also a culprit in the contribution of fake estrogens to the environment). None of this is proven, but if you're even talking about the possible source of the problem, pesticides and plastics rank much higher than birth control pills as a threat.
This is why the Vatican claim is fundamentally dishonest. They're not opposed to birth control pills because they're a threat to the environment. If the environment was really their concern, they'd be more worried about pesticide run-off than the private choices women make to avoid conception. They're engaging in dishonest tactics in the hope of tricking women into giving up their freely made choices.
Why does the Vatican fear honest discourse on this subject? The real argument against contraception from their point of view is that it thwarts God's plans for sex and marriage. If they believe it, why not just put it out there as it is, and allow women to consider it and freely decide whether or not they've persuaded us? I do believe it's frustrating for them to know that most women, even believing Catholics, reject the idea that we don't really love our men unless we risk pregnancy every time we touch them - but that's no excuse to resort to lying and coercion.
Perhaps they could try to hone their arguments? I suspect those arguments will continue to be rejected, but they could try. Perhaps they could consider the monstrous idea that women who use contraception have a good reason for our choices. But of course, that would require treating women like we're knowledgeable people about our own experiences, human beings with opinions worth considering. I suppose that for many in the church hierarchy, the "respecting women" choice is too awful to bear, making the immoral choice to lie all the more appealing in contrast.
