Benny Ratzo Pontificates Again

From the folks who brought you the Inquisition, more illuminating fundamentalist religious dogma served up as concern for the environment and of course, male breeding capacity.

In December, the Vatican opposed the use of the soon-to-be-available in Italy RU486 pill aka the morning-after contraception.

Faithful to its tradition of selective equivocation and/or denial of scientific data, the Vatican is claiming via its mouthpiece:

Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations said in a report in the Vatican newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, that not only do“[they] have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” but that the pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature” via female urine.

The Vatican's claim has been challenged by experts.

Here in Canada, scientists have demonstrated after decades of research on the Great Lakes, regarding the effect of contamination by PCBs:

... like many other chlorinated chemicals, PCBs are soluble in fat, so they tend to accumulate in living things and to enter the food webs, where they concentrate. The higher you are on a food chain, the greater the concentration of PCBs. Large fish and creatures that eat large fish, tend to accumulate in their flesh thousands, even millions of times the background levels of PCBs. Furthermore, by a cruel twist of fate, large birds and marine mammals (seals, sea lions, whales, and some dolphins) lack enzyme systems to efficiently detoxify PCBs. As a result, PCBs build up in the bodies of these predators and are passed to their offspring through eggs (in the case of fish and birds) and milk (in the case of mammals). PCBs mimic hormones and are a powerful disrupter of the endocrine system that governs reproduction. Marine mammals are already having trouble reproducing. It is entirely possible that, as more PCBs reach the oceans, all large mammals will disappear.

The Vatican is once again, attempting to spin stories to suit its ideological agenda.

Update: Antonia Z blogs about it here - Mellow Yellow. And more merriment, via Creekside's wise-beyond-her-days Emma Embryo.