Just when you thought it was safe and things couldn’t get much worse:
Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity
Erin Brockovich The Guardian 03/18/2021
The Everyday Chemicals That Might Be Leading Us to Our Extinction
New York Times, March 5, 2021
How to avoid the toxic kitchen chemicals that could damage your fertility
Washington Post March 5, 2021
By Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino
Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns
The Guardian
Miranda Bryant Fri 26 Feb 2021
Add the term “reprotoxic” to your vocabulary – meaning these chemicals harm the human reproductive capacities.
And, now, a rebuttal – from the New York Times June 3, 2021, The Sperm-Count ‘Crisis’ Doesn’t Add Up (possible pay-wall).
The article covers a lot of good points on this issue, like the problem with counting sperm: “Sperm-counting is a tricky business and notoriously prone to human error, Dr. Pacey said. (“I say it from the point of view of someone who spent 30 years counting sperm and knows how difficult it is,” he added.) In a 2013 review article, he noted that as methodologies for counting had improved and been standardized since the 1980s, sperm counts had appeared to fall. In other words, it may simply be that earlier scientists were overcounting sperm.”
I’m probably in the minority, but to be honest, human infertility doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is that most Americans choose to have biological children and they won’t even consider adopting or fostering a child until they’ve exhausted all their options (or their money) treating their infertility problems.
What I find problematic about reprotoxins is that wild animals may be affected. This would be completely unfair to them, and we are going to be sorry down the road when we find more animals that are endangered or extinct because of it.