The pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature” through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report.

“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” he said, without elaborating further.

This particular idea seems to be an extrapolation from a concept that’s excited the Catholic media for some time – the Pill is giving American male fish a nasty case of gender confusion. On this point, they appear to have half a point; a considerable number of different chemicals discharged from industry and sewage outfalls mimic the effects of estrogen and have bad effects on fish, as this Scientific American article discusses. The byproducts of the contraceptive pill are just a few of them; the Catholic media reports on the subject don’t seem to spend much time talking about the pesticides, plastics, and other sources of feminizing chemicals for some reason…

On the claim that a “a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West” things start to look extremely shaky. A January 2008 editorial in the Medical Journal of Australia discusses some of the issues relating to environmental contamination and male infertility. It’s quite a complex topic, unsurprisingly, and the writers believe that it is likely that there are environmental contaminants affecting male fertility in some heavily polluted environments. But it appears that these effects, if they exist, vary from country to country, and nobody has yet conclusively linked any particular chemical or chemicals with the observed declines. Reading between the lines, the Pill itself seems an unlikely candidate, given that it is used very widely around the Western world and thus you’d expect the effect to be more general.

The International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations has a website design that dates to somewhere around 1997. Aside from that, they appear to be a pressure group up in arms about the usual suspects for such a group.

All in all, it seems like a classic case of a pressure group with an axe to grind indulging in wild speculation based on a few snippets of science, while missing the big picture – the real and serious effects that waste, of many, many types, can have on both the environment and humanity.