May 2024 Networker: The Right to Bodily Integrity and Sovereignty |
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! |
Remember Roevember and Vote! |
| By Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow |
| In 2022, in a case known as Dobbs, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), thus revoking women’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Dobbs is the first time in U.S. history that an established liberty right has been taken away. Dobbs stripped women of their bodily autonomy. Now politicians control women’s bodies. Energized by their victory over Roe, men spurring the anti-choice movement are now pursuing two further goals: to ban abortion nationwide, even in states where it is now legal, and make birth control difficult or impossible for most women to get. To achieve both goals, anti-choice extremists may try to use a federal law that is already on the books: the so-called Comstock Act. Enacted by Congress in 1873, the Comstock Act made it a federal crime to deliver through the mail any item that might be used for abortion or birth control. Today, SCOTUS might interpret the current version of Comstock to ban from interstate commerce all medicines, instruments, or supplies needed to perform abortions or for birth control. Enforcing Comstock would not require an act of Congress. The President, acting alone, could order the Justice Department to enforce Comstock. There is little doubt that SCOTUS could invent a legal excuse to rubber stamp the deal. The plan to limit birth control |
| SCOTUS established the constitutional right of married couples to use birth control in 1965 in a case known as Griswold. The Court extended that same right to non-married people in 1972 in Eisenstadt. In deciding both Griswold and Eisenstadt, SCOTUS relied on the same legal logic they used to decide Roe in 1973—a constitutional right to privacy based in the 14th amendment. Now that SCOTUS has reversed Roe, Griswold and Eisenstadt are ripe for reversal too. In fact, in writing his Roe opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas specifically targeted Griswold and Eisenstadt for reversal. Notably, Thomas went even further, saying SCOTUS should also reverse Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which established a right to same-sex relationships, and Obergefell (2015), which established a right to same-sex marriage. Clearly, reversing Roe was only a first step. The rights of women and of LGBTQIA+ people are both now on the chopping block, with a cruel Supreme Court ready to execute. Continue Reading |
RePercussion Section: Renouncing My Common Ground Essay on Prenatal Threats |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist |
| Fifteen years ago, in an entirely different political moment, I wrote an essay arguing that pro-life and pro-choice could find common ground over the issue of prenatal toxicants. I no longer believe this is possible. And I no longer believe the search for such a thing is worth any sort of time or effort. Indeed, the very attempt would represent, to me, in this current political moment, a betrayal of my most deeply held values. So, with this column, I retract the one I wrote in 2009. I renounce it. I once had a lot of conservative readers because I grew up in a deeply religious community in rural central Illinois, and I wrote about the beauty of landscape there and helped some heroic farmers defeat a trash incinerator siting near my grandfather’s farm, among other things. Some of rural activists I worked with had developed their political skills blocking access to Planned Parenthood clinics to women seeking abortions. Here’s how I, a pro-choice adoptee who had had an abortion and wanted to talk openly about it, spoke to that deep-red readership at the dawn of the Obama Administration: |
| If you believe that unborn life is paramount, there is a conversation we need to have with each other, and that is a conversation about chemicals that have the ability to enter a woman’s body and sabotage her pregnancy. Abortion means more than a Planned Parenthood clinic. It also refers to what we in the scientific community call “spontaneous abortions,” what women call miscarriages, the risks of which go up when certain pollutants enter the opera of embryonic development at certain key moments. Methoxychlor, a common pesticide, has the ability, at vanishingly small concentrations, to prevent embryonic implantation. So do certain solvents. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, an ingredient of air pollution, can kill eggs in the ovary. In California, the closer a woman lives to agricultural fields where pesticides are sprayed, the higher her risk of stillbirth due to birth defects. PCBs and DDT are linked to preterm birth, a leading cause of infant death and disability…. Are these not pro-life issues?” |
| And here’s how I ended that essay: |
| I fervently wish for my daughter the right to determine her own reproductive path as well as the right to a pregnancy undisrupted by toxic chemicals. That feels like two sides of the same precious coin. I have often wondered what it would be like to bring all my audiences, pro-choice and pro-life, into one great amphitheater to begin the environmental conversation I imagine. I could start with the sentence that is always an applause line no matter whom I am addressing: “Let’s agree that any chemical with the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy.” |
| Yeah, no. Never doing that. Here’s what’s changed for me: I no longer believe that fetal sanctity is—or ever was—the guiding light behind the ascendency and triumphalism of the right-to-life movement. Continue Reading |
SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber had been participating in a public information session by a company attempting to expand gas pipeline infrastructure in the Hudson Valley when it was abruptly cut short. Coverage in the Albany Times Union. Dr. Sandra Steingraber spoke with Capital Tonight’s Susan Arbetter on the need for New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul to sign the CO2 fracking bill. Read Here. Updated from an earlier version, Orion Magazine published the remarkable essay, “From War Machine to Supermarket Staple: A History of the Plastic Bag,” by SEHN Board member Dr. Rebecca Altman. Read Here. SEHN science director Dr. Ted Schettler, who is also science advisor for Health Care Without Harm, co-wrote a piece with Emma Sirois, national director of the healthy food in healthcare program Health Care Without Harm: “Farm-to-Hospital Meals Can Help Protect Patients and the Climate,” published on MedPage Today. |
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