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Baby Trap: Why Anti-Environmental Evangelicals are Pro-Life Hypocrites
Damage to fetuses from pollutants causes spontaneous abortion. Toxins result in babies born with lifelong damage from cancer, incomplete development, future infertility. But, as I describe below, the "sanctity of life" crowd opposes environmental safeguards that will insure healthy fetuses, seemingly because it requires opposition to conservative corporate interests that they also support.
What's the womb issue? Here's one story released this week about the damage from womb exposure to mercury.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration say high levels of mercury are of particular concern for women in their childbearing years because exposure in the womb can cause neurological damage and other health problems to fetuses.
The story points out: The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have been pushing to drastically reduce mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants .... Mercury released from these plants, among other sources, settles into waterways, contaminating fish and the people who eat them. The Environmental Working Group has tested umbilical cord blood and found 287 manmade chemicals, of which 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects. "Industrial pollution begins in the womb," EWG reported.
Chemical exposures in the womb or during infancy can be dramatically more harmful than exposures later in life. Substantial scientific evidence demonstrates that children face amplified risks from their body burden of pollution; the findings are particularly strong for many of the chemicals found in this study, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins. Children's vulnerability derives from both rapid development and incomplete defense systems .... Even tiny amounts of chemicals can interfere with fetal development. Thousands of studies have confirmed that neurological damage and infertility can be traced to endocrine disruption from chemical pollutants passed through the placenta, as first described in Our Stolen Future.
So what does this have to do with the Religious Right? Why am I writing about environmental damage to fetal health on Talk2Action?
Because the same religious conservatives who are decrying pro-environmental "stewardship" by evangelical leaders are also waging the culture war and doing so in the name of the fetus. Blogger Bartholomew notes that the pro-environmental evangelical position has "caused some controversy" and has been criticized in particular by senator James Inhofe, who believes that global warming is a massive conspiracy cooked up by feminists and homosexuals.
The "culture war" offers far better promotional opportunities for the religious right than environmental activism. Explained a debunker of environmental evangelicals on Crosswalk (W)e must worry about cultural engagement; gospel advance; and being salt and light. But again, we need not worry about global warming. Hypocrisy particularly rises to the fore when environmental regulation is proposed to protect fetal health. In 2003, California legislator Wilma Chan proposed regulation to scale back the use of PBDEs, a fire retardant chemical that causes fetal damage, as my colleague Margie Kelly and I described in this article.
Chan was prompted by a 2001 report by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which found that small amounts of PDBEs can pass to a fetus through the placenta, causing nervous system damage, brain impairment or thyroid hormone imbalance. "Large numbers of women may carry these chemicals in their bodies and pass them on," said Chan.
But opposition arose from conservative lawmakers. "I found it totally ironic that conservative legislators are concerned with harm to the fetus when it deals with abortion, but not when the health of the future baby is concerned," said Chan. Environmental groups and reproductive rights groups have noted the nexus, as Margie and I wrote in 2002, quoting a health activist.
"The same people -- think of Jesse Helms -- who are taking away reproductive rights are also the people who demand corporate autonomy and a free market for companies that expose people to reproductive toxins without their choice," said Charlotte Brody. The focus on attacking abortion makes it easy to demonize individual women, and takes attention away from corporate misdeeds. The price of this "culture war" damages all of our futures, wrote Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women:
While President Bush was signing the Unborn Victims of Violence Act into law and declaring his commitment to a culture of life, he was also deregulating coal burning power plants. These plants release significant amounts of mercury into the environment, which is especially poisonous to fetuses and children. The administration uses fetal rights, anti-abortion legislation to distract us from these attacks on family health. It's encouraging to learn that 86 evangelical leaders launched an environmental initiative. Making sure that men and women who want to have children can have healthy children in a safe environment is a step in the right direction -- it might the sole patch of common ground that prochoice advocates can also support.
Baby Trap: Why Anti-Environmental Evangelicals are Pro-Life Hypocrites | 9 comments (9 topical, 0 hidden)
Baby Trap: Why Anti-Environmental Evangelicals are Pro-Life Hypocrites | 9 comments (9 topical, 0 hidden)
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