On Bodily Integrity: An Extended Note from our Executive Director
by Carolyn Raffensperger
In this issue of the Networker we deal with the complex issue of women’s rights, reproduction, toxic chemicals, and how the political system affects our bodily integrity. We recognize that each person comes to this issue with their own history and experience of infertility, bearing beloved children, abortion, toxic chemical exposures, and so much more. We also acknowledge how difficult it is to approach these topics with the nuance and care they deserve given the current political heat around them. Our work on the precautionary principle and the prevention of suffering informs how we address these thorny issues. We acknowledge that there is enormous suffering and we will do all we can to prevent more.
Aldo Leopold said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
In the early 1990s I sat in an upstairs meeting room of the Palmer House in Chicago with the magnificent scientist, Dr. Theo Colborn, and a group of funders and other scientists. Theo was presenting her research on the effect of toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes on the birds that make their home along the shores of the Lakes.
A mile or two north, my father, Dr. John Raffensperger was seeing patients at what was then called Children’s Memorial Hospital, where he served as Surgeon-in-Chief.
I introduced my father to the research on bird defects that Theo linked to toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes. He was taken aback by the similarities Theo was finding in birds with the children he was caring for.
We now have an extensive scientific literature on toxic chemicals and their impact on children and adults, both male and female. Toxic chemicals are associated with many cancers, birth defects, neurodevelopmental problems in children, and neurodegenerative disorders in elders.
Even before Theo’s work on what became known as endocrine disruptors, we had clear information about the effects of air and water pollution. In the 1970s several states passed constitutional amendments that asserted the right to a clean and healthy environment. Two years ago the United Nations passed a resolution recognizing that everyone has this right.
Amazing.
But this right to live free of pollution, to be born without plastics in our bodies and pesticides in our blood, is continually under threat.
Politics, and who we elect, determined past efforts (or the lack of them) to protect our bodies from the scourge of toxic chemicals, and will determine our future. The coming November 2024 election is an inflection point and may determine whether we maintain the right to bodily integrity and sovereignty.
Each person deserves dignity and autonomy as part of that sovereignty over our own bodies. Central to that sovereignty is the right to give our consent or withhold our consent from decisions or activities that affect our bodies. The right to a clean and healthy environment and the right to choose to end a pregnancy are bound together. These rights to bodily integrity and autonomy are under threat with the coming election.
Theo Colborn’s work was foundational for SEHN’s path-making work on the precautionary principle, which stood for the premise that we should prevent the preventable suffering. The laws and policies that allowed polluters to justify their contributions to cancer or birth defects using economics is anathema. Over the past 26 years we at SEHN have devoted all our resources to protecting the right to a clean and health environment. And now we see that this right could be further undermined in November, depending on the outcome of the local, state, and federal elections.
In the years before Theo’s book came out, George Bush was elected president and Dan Quayle was elected vice president. In a strange twist of fate, Bush appointed Quayle's campaign chairman, Gordon Durnil, to head up the International Joint Commission which oversees the Great Lakes. Durnil became deeply alarmed by the science on endocrine disruption that was emerging in the early and mid-1990s. Durnil became an advocate for the precautionary principle early on and attended the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle that we held in 1998.
Durnil wrote a book about his conversion to environmentalism. He said this:
[T]he consequences to humans and their children cannot even be predicted. However, the increased risks of cancer to the exposed adult, and more worrisome, the effect on the unborn progeny of the exposed, are frightening.
It is not as if these things are not happening and not being reported. They are. So how can we ignore them, especially when they raise such serious questions about today's societal problems? Here are some ponderables:
What if, as current research suggest, the startling decrease in male sperm count and the alarming increase in the incidence of male genital tract disorders are in fact being caused in part as a result of in utero exposure to elevated levels of environmental estrogens?
What if, as current research suggests, the increasing numbers of breast cancer victims are being brought about in part by the great numbers and quantities of estrogen-like compounds that have been and are being released into the environment?
What if the declining learning performance and increasing disobedience of our children in schools is not so much a function of the quality of our educational system but is, in part, related to the great numbers and quantities of developmental toxins that are being released into the environment, or to which these children have been exposed in utero?
What if the breakdown of traditional values, such as two-parent homes and parental responsibility, monogamous relationship, and sexual preferences, are not related to the breakdown of traditional morality but instead to the government-permitted immorality of the unknowing or uncaring harm related to the discharge of persistent toxic substances into our environment?
Durnil concludes his book with a call to action.
The Time for Toxic Tolerance is Past…Don't demand 100 percent proof of harm before action. Think about morality and the Golden Rule. I have come to the conclusion that we are unintentionally putting our children and our grandchildren in harm's way. I have concluded that we need a basic change in direction. The future depends on you. Tell your neighbors. Tell your state legislator or your member of Congress that you want and demand environmental change. Tell local industry that you want proper stewardship get involved. Make some noise. Kick up some dust...your words, your actions, do matter... we should be leading the parade!
And I—and my colleague Peter Montague, whose article appears in this newsletter—would add: Vote. Rene Dubos said that every civilization creates the conditions for its own illnesses. We have the opportunity to elect people that create the conditions for health, autonomy and bodily integrity if we vote wisely.
https://ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011spring/my-body-the-earth-the-earth-my-body/