A Green Response to Green Birth Control

As concerns about ecological sustainability continue to impact the ways in which people think about how their actions affect our planet, some have began to take critical looks at how and to what degree our methods of contraception degrade our natural resources. "Tree-Humper: What's the greenest form of birth control?" by Slate's Nina Shen Rastogi is one such critical inspection, though it has a few lapses of green judgment.

Writing of condom selection for the eco-minded, Rastogi correctly notes that condoms "contain preservatives and hardening agents to make sure the rubber can withstand a fair amount of friction" and that those additives "make it harder for the condoms to break down in the landfill."

Due to these factors, Rastogi recommends switching to lambskin condoms. I totally disagree for two reasons. First, lambskin condoms do not prevent the transmission of STIs like latex and polyurethane condoms do, putting you and your partner(s) at risk for infection. Why don't they protect against STIs? Well, that begets the second reason you shouldn't switch to lambskin condoms, that being that they are cruel and disgusting. Lambskin condoms are actually made of sheep, meaning that sheep are killed and their intestines harvested for the production of lambskin condoms. I don't know about you, but I really don't desire cute, now-dead sheep intestines to be anywhere near my body, much less my genitals. And, returning, why do lambskin condoms unable to protect against STIs? Because they are made of organic tissue, lambskin condoms have pores, and any viral STI is small enough to pass through said pores. Moreover, the fact that lambskin condoms are derived from sheep means that, in order to make a lambskin condom, you must first make a sheep, and that takes a lot of resources. One study by Cornell University finds that that the energy-input to meat-output ratio of sheep husbandry is 50:1. In other words, it takes fifty pounds of grain to make a single pound of sheep; with production inefficiencies like this one, lambskin condoms are hardly a "green" alternative.

Pweez don't kill me and stuff my intestines into your erogenous zones, ok?

But what about the amount of waste actually made by disposing of condoms? Well, according to Rastogi's calculations, about 1,365 tons of condom waste are produced each year in the United States, which makes condom waste less than .001% of the estimated 152 million tons of trash produced by Americans each year. For comparison, if Americans could waste only 1,365 tons of food each year, they could feed the world's hungriest several times over with the leftovers. Condom waste, then, is truly so neglible in the scope of green thinking that I feel we could focus on much more pressing things, such as the environmental effects of meat production or the continued threats of slashing environmental protection dollars.

Rastogi also exposes rising concerns about how estrogens from birth control are affecting our waters. Back in 2007, some EPA scientists found that higher concentrations of birth control hormones seeping into natural waters increased the number of intersex fish. By netting and sexing 123 fish downstream of the Boulder, Colorado water sewage treatment facility, scientists found that ten of the fish were intersex, supposedly a large number. However, this article (and the research that inspired it) fail to mention how many intersex fish are expected to be found naturally in that fish population. Oh, they didn't talk about the part in which all biosexually-dimorphous organisms have naturally-occurring intersex individuals among their populations? Cuz they do. Given that several meta-studies have disproven the myth that estrogens and phytoestrogens cause biological feminization in human males, I am highly skeptical that increased levels of mammalian sex hormones would escalate the numbers of intersex fish. In fact, the sex-determination system of fish isn't even the XX/XY system of mammals, but rather the ZW system in which males are homogametic and females are heterogametic (the opposite is true in mammals), and so any supposed correlation between human sex hormones and the biosexual expression of fish seems highly doubty.

I may not be entirely male or female, but I am ALL FABULOUS (because I'm a rainbow trout)!

Fortunately, Rastogi doesn't get caught up on this feeble argument, and instead offers that better water treatment is the best way to avoid dumping estrogens into our waterways.

So, what is something you can do to make your sex greener? Use contraception! The truth is, no matter the ways you prevent pregnancy, the truth is that the resources used to grow a person will always be greater than those to produce all forms of birth control. To make your sex even greener, you can also switch to an organic lube or stick to the internet forms of pornography to avoid excess paper production! And who said going green wasn't fun?

Being eco-conscious and sexy do mix!