One scandal of the COVID era was the alliance between government and some social media platforms to suppress doubt and dissent about the regime—especially compulsory vaccinations—to control the pandemic.
A casualty has been the erosion of trust in what “experts” declare in the name of “public health.” Lack of trust is one reason behind the current battle in the United States Senate over whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment and failing to answer a Senate committee’s questions about his COVID decision-making.
Which makes one ask about the investigation and debate about another public question about public health: the public health impact of widespread use of mifepristone and misoprostol, the “abortion pills.”
Mifepristone and misoprostol essentially act by the manipulation of a woman’s hormonal levels to prevent a fertilized ovum from implanting in his mother’s uterus, being able to acquire nutrition, and developing. One might characterize the “abortion pill” (a misnomer, since there are two) as do-it-yourself miscarriages.
Most chemically induced abortions occur at home. An abortionist prescribes the drugs (sometimes after only having remotely examined his “patient” by an online platform from another state) and sends the woman home. She typically expels the developing embryo (and a lot of blood) into her toilet.
The hormones and other chemical agents in the mifepristone do not dissipate in a woman’s body. They are excreted into the toilet, i.e., eventually into the public sewer system. And that’s where a public health issue arises.
In June, 14 state attorneys general, led by Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway, asked the Food and Drug Administration to study the effect of growing hormonal discharges into public water systems. The attorneys general voiced concern about seepage and the effects of elevated levels of hormones in the ambient environment, especially regarding other pregnant women not intent on aborting their children or the physiological development of young people entering puberty.
Abortionists, who seek to minimize the dangers DIY chemical abortions pose, dismiss these claims as “unproven.” It’s hard to prove something you don’t want to study: vincible ignorance is bliss, if dishonest. They would like to write off such objections as just another “TRAP” (targeted restriction of abortion providers) that lacks a “scientific” basis.
The lessons of COVID should make us skeptical, if not agnostic, about nearly everything claimed in the name of “science.”
Once upon a time, no doubt, smoking was also characterized as a “matter of choice.” Smoke if you want to; do not smoke if you do not. But scientific research began suggesting that no man is an island, immune from another’s smoke pollution. That is why concern about exposure to “secondary smoke” has largely resulted in smoke-free public places where once smoking was tolerated, in restaurants, meeting rooms, and even airplanes. The idea of private “choice” has been tempered by accounting for the communal impact such chosen behavior has.
Pro-life groups have showcased studies suggesting that growing amounts of abortion-related chemicals are being found in urban water systems. The response of media and “public health” gatekeepers has not been to investigate claims but to denounce them. This was the modus operandi a decade ago, when David Daleiden came up against California authorities more interested in protecting Planned Parenthood than investigating whether the abortion giant was profiting from post-abortion sales of body parts.
Attacks also often take the form of criticizing the messenger. Well, assuming that the idea that life begins at fertilization and life should be protected–some basic postulates of biology and ethics—then is the fault the voices crying in the publishing wilderness that bring these stories to the public? Or is it the fault of the “gatekeepers” such as academic presses like California and Rutgers that have maintained a steady drumbeat for “reproductive rights” since Dobbs was handed down?
And, in the name of a robust exchange of views, are we to say it’s just a matter of “academic freedom” when a venerable publisher like Oxford puts out a philosopher’s musings that human extinction would actually be a good thing—if we could only find a way around the pesky ethical issue of how to bring that about?
There are two separate but related issues here: the broader impact on the common good from the proliferation of chemical abortion agents, whose spread is essential to the abortion industry’s circumvention of post-Dobbs state regulation, and the larger question of whether Americans trust the public health “authorities” that increasingly seem to have their own, sanitized through invoking the name of “science.”
Of the former, Americans have a right to know whether a “woman’s private choice” is affecting other pregnant women and sexually developing young people. On the latter, they have a right to know what is being smuggled in under the rubric of “public health.”
I close with a story I wrote about a year ago. Two Michigan bioterrorists “bioethicists,” publishing in a prestigious journal, advocated for intentionally making people sick through bioengineering ticks to carry Alpha-Gal Syndrome. Persons infected with AG Syndrome through tick bites become allergic to eating red meat, which the authors argue has a “public health” benefit by reducing beef demand, resulting in fewer cows heating the planet.
When ideological agendas are infiltrated in the name of what should objectively be “public health,” is it any wonder why so many “experts” might want to take the Fifth?
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Last para. – When ideological agendas infiltrate . . . (or, alternatively, When discussions of public health are infiltrated by ideological agendas . . .)
C’mon, Mr. Grondelski. I don’t need to tell you that “Grammar Is Important”.
Timely and necessary article.
Yer rite. Grammer, like not mispelling words, is important. Passive voice should be avoided. 🤣
I like Grammer.
What do they have to fear if the chemicals are not dispersed and recycled via the water supply? Are PFAs from foaming fire retardants and PBBs from the 1970s livestock feed disaster not already known to be in the environment? Asbestos unnecessarily removed from public buildings due to the remote chance of damaging infection; yet their destruction stirs up more of the available chemical than their current existence.
Follow only the science, not ultimately the Almighty, and see what you get. The common sense bestowed on mankind is no longer a factor.
A very interesting read. We are truly navigating a mine field when it comes to the issue of trust. Some things cannot just be swept under the carpet. There is it seems no appetite for some reckoning. The RCC was no friend to many in the so called pandemic. We had a Pope who told us we owed it to each other to go against conscience regarding unethical vaccine, many churches closed. Sunday Mass obligation was cancelled. We now have an issue here in Europe concerning mass migration of mainly single Muslim men. Somehow the church presents the issue as an influx of families fleeing war zones. It is blatantly untrue. I remember some years ago one of my children asking me if Father Christmas was real. I did not want to destroy childish fantasy yet having been asked a direct question I could not tell a direct lie, to do so would undermine trust. How about if he asked me does God really exist? Would he trust me if he knew I had once lied? I say this because as an adult I am feeling very wary of both church and state. It feels Orwellian, told not to believe the evidence of our eyes.
It is interesting how fast Vatican 2’s teaching about the rights of conscience evaporates when the progressive wing of the Church wants to bind everyone to their poorly thought out prudential judgements.
And how quickly the irreformability and clarity of doctrine is hidden away when it is a matter of sexual morals or false ecumenism.
Amanda: Brilliantly said!!!
Exactly.
We already have over 65 years’ worth of synthetic hormones in the water table from the near ubiquitous use of the contraceptive pill. Is this more of the same, or something worse?
THAT would be an interesting study.
Fun fact, the most synthetic hormones in water come from agriculture not human use (the stuff that cows get to keep their milk flowing).
Human hormone discharge (such as via wastewater treatment plants from birth control or HRT prescriptions) also enters municipal water cycles, though livestock operations generally contribute a larger total environmental estrogen load in intensive farming regions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412016304494
The bsa hormone, is that what is to stimulate more production? Neighbors used that but the cows didn’t like the daily? poke and the feed requirements also went up, so they stopped.
I’ve looked but can find nowhere any denunciation of hormones in our water supply by our environmentally obsessed bishops.
Interesting, but our priest did include an explanation of the pill’s effect on wildlife, like frogs, to explain that these chemicals are not removed or diluted/broken down.
From the cited “studies” (0.041 micrograms per liter) we read that “significant levels of mifepristone (micrograms/liter) in the water of all but one of the nine sampling classes.”
Two points on the intersection of lab science and moral public policy, and a summary:
FIRST, for reader convenience, the science of chemical detection is technically very far advanced and, therefore, requires an understanding of the placement of decimal points. One microgram (1.0) per liter is equivalent to half a teaspoon in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The action threshold for arsenic in municipal water supplies, for example, is ten parts per billion (10.0 micrograms per liter). This is 250 times as concentrated as the reported mifepristone levels. For lead the threshold is 15.0 micrograms per liter, or 375 times as concentrated as the reported level for mifepristone.
This remark is NOT a comment on the risk policy for mifepristone, but simply translation of what the numbers mean. (We might recall the inability of Congressmen to distinguish between Millions of dollars (6 zeros) spent partly to garner votes, and a cumulative national debt measured in Trillions of dollars (12 zeros!)—now $40,000,000,000,000!)
SECOND, regarding the reference to EDCs in general (Endocrine Disruptive Chemicals), there’s the possibility of rare cases of biological confusion (not more commonly getting locked in due to early sexual experimentation or peer or cultural misdirection) caused by the intervention of EDCs in the brain development of the preborn child—regardless of the male/female DNA chromosomes. The scientific literature is beginning to explore how EDCs might obstruct the developing brain from conforming itself to the weeks-earlier sexual differentiation of the physical body. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.4137/EHI.S39825 We also read of epigenetics as a sort of off-on switch affecting the intact DNA. Epigenetics can be learned but can also be unlearned.
SUMMARY: Yours truly is only a casual reader in all of the above, but we should be alert—generally—to misapplied environmental detection limits, and to ways of protecting mothers from exposing their unborn children to ubiquitous EDCs.
I don’t think this is a major driver of infertility; rather obesity and the early use of contraceptive pills (for any number of reasons, like acne and yes, birthcontrol) and more important.
Pornography, masturbation, high stress levels, and general poor health can also contribute.
A good water filtration pitcher or system can clear out most pharmaceuticals. There’s no filter for what you do to yourself.
I don’t believe the filtration systems are as good as you think; will they filter out estrogen? I know they can’t get all the nano plastics or whatever they are called. Plus wouldn’t you be exposed taking a shower or bath?
The obsession over “hormones” in the water supply distracts from the actual fertility damaging effects of the much larger pesticide and synthetic chemical contamination of our environment. After all, if you are squeamish about the fact that women regularly menstruate into toilets just avoid the public water supply.
https://www.endocrine.org/topics/edc/what-edcs-are/common-edcs
Suzanne: it’s not either or; it’s both and…
It’s both darling.
Isn’t that mostly blood related?
Is there an obsession or a concern?
My point is that human synthetic hormones are not the major contaminants in our water supply. Concern over them should not obscure the larger amounts that come from agriculture including pesticides and plastics.
True, we should be concerned about pollution in general. Some pollutants though seem more disturbing than others. And unnecessary.
“Somehow the Church presents the issue as an influx of families fleeing war zones. It is blatantly untrue.”
The Church is losing credibility on the issue of mass immigration and Islamization of the West (understatement).
See The Catholic Thing, Aug.9.
And from:
How to be a Dhimmi
Francis X. Maier on Monday, August 10, 2026
“When the Church allows herself to be seen as more concerned with strangers of alien (and historically resistant and unfriendly) faith than with the needs of her own people – the people who will bear the cost of unrestrained immigration – she colludes in her own disappearance.”
See: pathological altruism: Barbara Oakley appears to be the originator of this term, however, this might be an extension of this concept.
It is the apotheosis of the Francine inversion of the prudential with the imperative. Prelates who continue to insist that Christianity requires the cultural, demographic, economic and spiritual exhaustion and surrender of peoples residing in nations they believe to have limitless prosperity. They demand the unlimited import and support of outsiders without shared values and traditions. At some point, they will create a violent reaction-and maybe fulfill Cardinal George’s prediction about a successor dying in the street.
There is an element of betrayal in this-and it involves “thirty pieces of silver”.
The provocateur Hasan Piker laid out the objective of demographic war in terms to graphic for this forum.
Similarly, one has to wonder if the proliferation of marijuana is governed by ideological concerns rather than actual health benefits at the same time that tobacco smoking has been vilified and driven underground. One can’t help but wonder if second-hand marijuana smoke is dangerous to non-smokers as second-hand tobacco exposure is. Yep, just rename the marijuana pusher a “dispensary” and he’s a-okay– just as they call abortion “health care.”
Andrew: you’re very correct. In fact, research going back 40 years established that the pulmonary residues from THC was greater than that of tobacco. But, then again, everything is subject to politicization.
I read an interesting premise a long time ago-don’t remember where-that posited that smoking tobacco in certain instances may have been more healthful than not. If I recall the premise of the article, it specified a pipe (not cigarettes so not a lot of inhalation), naturally grown and dried tobacco not treated with chemicals or modified, and a pre-modern medicine environment.
The premise was under those CIRCUMSTANCES, one might have received more benefit from the smoke acting as repellent to an insect that might have just visited a manure pile or carcass before landing on you, than any harm that might be expected to occur decades later, when you might already expect to be dead.
I don’t have the background to affirm or deny the notion, but it was interesting to think that while smoking was an accepted convention until recently, what constituted “smoking” was a completely different activity when using cigarettes rather than a pipe.
I believe Readers Digest exposed the dangers on this in the late 50s or early 60s. My mother used to say, everyone bowled and everyone there smoked, especially after the war, when I think soldiers got free cigs. Chewing it causes oral cancer as well.
Cigarettes were free in military rations and cut rate in the PX. The military found a way to keep the troops alert and occupied at the same time-nicotine. If they had only stuck to the other favorite stimulant-caffeine.
Old Golds?
My grandma, God bless her soul, smoked Old Gold straights.
Tobacco use might have been one of the factors that kept us slimmer back then since it can reduce our appetite. But at a cost.
My grandpa smoked little cigars for over 70 years and died approaching his 95th year.
There may be some genetics involved that can protect us from the effects of tobacco. Or like pipes, cigars are a different thing from cigarettes. I don’t know.
Perhaps smoke helped to ward off mosquitoes.
He probably was physically active.
He had worked on ships from the age of 13. So I guess so.
Or nagging spouses? Just kidding
Cigar smoke made me feel sick for sure. That may have been the case also for my Nana.
Grew up around hippies and they stop breathing to hold that stinking smoke in as long as they can to absorb the chemicals. Yes, it’s not good for you on second base either.
During the pandemic quarantine, Washington state designated both dispensaries of marijuana and offices of abortion-procurement as “essential” service providers. They were thus not subject to closure.
MI was similar including liquor. Also, you couldn’t fish using a power boat because you might stop and get fuel for your vehicle or boat motor. By touching the pump handle you could be infected with or spread the virus. You could use a rowboat though. I guess you were expected to eat the bait. “Let em eat worms!”
When she finally lifted the ban on boats shortly before Memorial Day, she urged citizens to stay home. Her husband snuck up north unknown to her, and tried to butt in line ahead of others (in a nice way) to get his boat out of storage – the owner told him he’s have to wait in line like everyone else, since his wife had the state locked down until recently.
In my Commonwealth (Pennsylvania), the liquor stores were also afforded the status of “necessity”. Now of course, despite the passage of “Act 39” in 2016, the Commonwealth is the major purveyor of liquor, which until recently returned “profits” of $185 million annually to the state treasury, along with $600 plus million in liquor taxes, plus payments to the State Police for enforcement, and several millions more in various grants to colleges and others to mitigate ‘binge” and underage drinking, and some to other Commonwealth agencies-including some to promote drinking. Gov. Tom (the) Wolf and the rest of the folks had a financial incentive to keep selling.
People who follow the liquor business know it is collapsing. Some speculate it’s “sober curious” and others, the disrupted socialization experienced during the lockdowns.
One thing is sure, It won’t be the cash cow of the future.
The French, of all people, published results of a study of 75,000 people and drinking. Their conclusion was there is no safe level of drinking.
My first clue that there was something weird coming in 2020 was seeing a number of shopping buggies full of wine & liquor being loaded into vehicles in the Costco parking lot. I at first thought every local restaurant owner was restocking , then I figured out it was just a provisions priority for some people before the lockdown. Alcohol, not canned goods.
Find out if somebody bought put options on their domestic vinous operations or distributors.
We seem to have these gyrations on the safety of things. In the 1970’s I had an aunt who was always pushing carob as a substitute for chocolate, because it was considered unhealthy. Then there was a change, where the typical candy bar was laden with sugar wasn’t healthy, but dark chocolate cxontained polyphenols and was cardioprotective. In the last year or so, articles have appearing making claims about chocolate containing cadmium, because the pods are typically dried directly on the ground and there’s a lot of volcanic ash and residue in Central and South American soils. Make you wonder about any crops raised there.
When it comes right down to eat, you die no matter what you consume. One of the few indisputable truths ever uttered by the pederast economist John Msaynard Keynes was “in the long run, we’re all dead”.
My aunt= despite all her efforts to be healthy- was diagnosed with Alzheimers Related Dementia in her mid 60’s and died at 71. We tended to look at some of her more curious behaviors (agoraphobia) that emerged in her 50’s as potential unrecognized symptoms after the diagnosis. She was quite capable of being quite convivial after contracting the disease-but there came a point at a Thanksgiving dinner where she offered to help dry dished and then asked my Mother “how many kids do you have” that made the diagnosis completely unexplainable by other conditions.
While we live in a sinful world, we’re bound to suffer from the residue. What technology fails to alleviate we as Christians make use of in the economy of salvation.
From the National Sanitary Foundation:
Emerging Contaminants, on the NSF/ANSI 401 standard.
From water filter maker AquaSana (not a product endorsement from me):
How to Detox Your Water from Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs)
Rereading these comments. Amused to see comments seconding my grammar (hyper?)vigilance.
I am a great admirer of Mr. Grondelski’s writing, both content and form. His column in The Catholic Thing today (Aug. 13) is pure gold, IMO.
Gold? that might be platinum. John’s great attribute is that he reads comments and interacts with commenters (unlike some authors, not naming names, but KC and The Sunshine Band comes to mind) who make a point of stating they don’t read comments.
As an adjunct, just once we need to hear that from the lectern. There was a time (my parent’s day) when Parishes sponsored dances for the young to meet when they are “single and ready to mingle”, and I’m waiting to hear something about the need to provide for the institutional church to provide for that. There’s so much fixation on material fetishizing poverty, but the poverty of loneliness among the young goes unaddressed.
We do need more fellowship & opportunities for young people to meet each other. Other denominations seem to make that more of a priority.
I used to visit a Mennonite sewing circle & most of the young ladies married around 21. Their church was very small but they networked with other Mennonite communities to plan events & service opportunities where their children could meet.
Excellent article! I’m sure others have already pointed this out, but I have maintained for years that the wide use of contraceptives (hormones) certainly contributes to a great amount of hormones present in the water supply. Wastewater gets recycled after all. The same rivers and streams used for expelling “treated” wastewater are then used for water supply involving further treatment. However, I am absolutely certain that, while our water supply companies treat the water for bacteria and other parasites, as well as neutralizing chemicals that may be present, probably do NOTHING to filter out or neutralize hormones that are present. Gee, I wonder what effect these might have on women’s (not to mention men’s) fertility! Or do they possibly contribute to other maladies that seem to be on the rise in recent decades?