THE CONTRACEPTIVE PILL WOULD HAVE BEEN BANNED UNDER TODAY'S "NO RISK" RULES

From an interview with Prof. Carl Djerassi that appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on Sept., 7th, 2005:

The professor and I were talking about sex. Lots of sex. A hundred million acts of sexual intercourse every 24 hours. "That's not just in Australia," he said, seeing my eyes widen. "That's around the world," said the man responsible for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive or, if you prefer, the Pill.

For someone who only hours before had stepped off a flight from London, Professor Carl Djerassi, the father of the Pill, appeared remarkably freshfaced. In Australia on a lecture tour to promote his books and plays, the silverhaired septuagenarian agreed to meet for a quick chat about sex in a coffee shop at The University of Queensland.

"We did the chemical work on the Pill in the early '50s. Did we realise it would become an oral contraceptive and would it be used for that? The answer is no. "I think anyone who says otherwise is lying. No one - not the scientists, not the pharmaceutical companies, and there were a few which were interested at that time - anticipated that it would be accepted as quickly and as widely.

Did you know Australia was the second country after the US to approve it" ? It was approved in the US in 1960 and in Australia in 1961.

"In a way it reflected the similarities in the cultures between Australia and America. In the States, within two years two million women were on the Pill. No one thought of this and by the end of the decade it was close to six million."

Djerassi has a theory, or a firm belief. the Pill could easily have been banned before it made it to the marketplace. I believe that if we had done our work 15 years later with the Pill becoming available in the 70s, there would be no oral contraceptives today." he said. I'm absolutely sure that there was only that one 15-year window of opportunity when it was possible to introduce the Pill and we did it. It had nothing to do with science and everything to do with society, economics and attitudes towards science and technology which are now much more dubious than what they were in the 1950s.

"So much happened in science and technology in the '70s. We realised that things moved much more rapidly than we were able to digest and we started to focus on some of the negative effects. "We started to talk about DDT and discovering the side effects of the Pill. Suddenly the headlines were saying `the Pill kills'.

"Everything has side effects but we ignore the side effects of everyday living. Many more women die in childbirth than were ever killed by the side effects of the Pill.

"You can talk about freon and its effect on the ozone layer. At one time we thought that freon was fantastic. DDT was fantastic and probably saved more lives than any other chemical when you think about what it did for malaria and typhoid epidemics in Naples after World War II. People forget that.

"We are starting to become much more concerned about safety rather than efficacy. Now it's 'let's take our time, do it slower' and there is the explosion of the litigious climate in the US. In the States they say 'sue the bastards' because we have no general health insurance. We have no system that would reimburse those who are damaged. You can only do it by going for the deep pockets, which is industry, and you collect.".....

"The other thing that happened in the '60s was the sexual revolution and people talk about either blaming or crediting the Pill with it, depending on where they're coming from. "That's a gross over-simplification. The Pill was in the 1960s - the decade of the rock 'n' roll music scene, the drug culture, the hippie scene and, most importantly of all, women's liberation. "You have four movements, all of them to do with sexual liberation, promiscuity and sexual freedom. "If there had been no Pill, it would still have happened but you would have had millions of illegal abortions that were avoided because of the Pill."

Djerassi believes that the pill also is wrongly blamed for a drop in birth rates. "If you have less than two children per family then the population goes down and there is no European country, with the exception of Albania and Malta, that has more than two children per family. Italy has 1.1 children per family.

"Social changes have caused this. The Pill merely facilitated them. The black and and white proof of this is Japan. Japan has exactly the same problem as Australia, Singapore and Western Europe in terms of ageing of the population and reduction in the birth rate. Japan has about 1.5 children per family. It is the most rapidly ageing of the industrialised countries. Twenty per cent of the people are above the age of 60 and it has a lousy social security system.

"Yet the Pill was only legalised in Japan in 1999, so here you see a classic example when it comes to birth control. Japan is barely entering the 20th century. Condoms and the rhythm method are the two most common methods - and abortion. "Japan was the first country right after World War II to use abortion as a method of birth control when condoms were not yet legal.





America's pristine myth

Next week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish; flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed.

But in recent decades most archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers have come to believe that this Edenic image isn't true. When Columbus landed, the new research suggests, the Western Hemisphere wasn't filled with scattered bands of ecologically pure hunters and gatherers. Instead, it was a thriving, diverse place; a tumult of languages, trade, and culture; the home to tens of millions of people - more, some researchers believe, than Europe at that time.

Then, the majority of native Americans lived south of the Rio Grande. They were not wanderers with tepees; they built up and lived in some of the world's biggest, most opulent cities. Tenochtitlán, the greatest city in the aggressive military alliance best-known as the Aztec empire, may have had a quarter-million inhabitants - more than London or Paris. It glittered on scores of artificially constructed islands in the middle of a great lake in central Mexico. On first encountering this metropolis, the conquistadors gawped like yokels at the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades. Hundreds of boats flitted like butterflies around the city's canals and the three grand causeways that linked it to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains to the city. Perhaps most astounding to the Spaniards, according to their memoirs, were the botanical gardens - at the time, none existed in Europe. Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. (Otherwise, the cities wouldn't have survived.)

According to a painstaking 2000 inventory of the evidence by geographer William E. Doolittle of the University of Texas at Austin, agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental US, with large swaths of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the Midwest and Southeast maize fields, thousands of earthen mounds - priestly ceremonial centers - stippled the land. When the Pilgrims landed, they discovered that Indians had peeled back the great forests of the eastern seaboard, lining the coast with farms that stretched inland for miles. (There was little farming in the Northwest, but salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the region.)

Further south, Indians had converted the Mexican basin and Yucatán into artificial environments suitable for farming. Terraces and canals and stony highways lined the Western face of the Andes. Raised fields and causeways covered Bolivian Amazonia. Farms dotted Argentina and central Chile. At the time of conquest, Indians had converted perhaps a quarter of the Amazon forest into farms and agricultural forests - an area the size of France and Spain combined.

Where Indians didn't farm, they burned - mainly clearing underbrush to retool local ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. They burned enough trees to let bison, creatures of the prairie, survive from New York to Georgia. Indigenous fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. They burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by those who arrived there first. "When Lewis and Clark headed west from [St. Louis]," wrote ethologist Dale Lott, "they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans."

In sum, most researchers believe that at the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. For the most part, this new perspective hasn't made its way into textbooks - or the lesson plans of this nation's hardworking elementary school teachers. Instead, they purvey, with the best of intentions, what geographer William Denevan calls "the pristine myth." Like most parents, I don't want to get in a fight with my daughter's school. But I'd also like her to be taught something close to what most scientists believe.

One reason that this version of history continues to be taught is that it provides a way for schools to give lessons about conservation. In my experience, this has been transformed into the notion that we should return the land, as much as possible, to the wilderness it was before Columbus. Don't litter, do recycle, don't cut down the forests - we should learn from the Indians, the story goes, and leave the land alone.

At first glance, recognizing that the American landscape was heavily managed seems to undermine this view. For this reason, some environmentalists have rejected the new scholarship. But understanding that we inhabit a landscape irrevocably shaped by human beings doesn't imply that we should endorse careless wastefulness - let the bulldozers rip! Although Indian engineering led to some disasters, for the most part its impact on the environment was, as Mr. Denevan notes, "subtle, transformative, and persistent." The forests were burned and the land was farmed, but the soil was left largely intact, or even improved; despite their large numbers, there is little evidence that native Americans often exhausted or polluted water supplies, or overran their resource base.

As William I. Woods, director of the environmental studies program at the University of Kansas, has put it, their efforts were directed at constructing today the kind of environment they wanted to inhabit tomorrow - and they were usually quite good at it. This is a lesson I wouldn't mind my daughter learning in school.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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