Several years ago, while I was an activist with an organization called Zero Population Growth (they recently changed their name to Population Connection), I decided I wouldn't have any children in order to make up for all the people who were having more than two. I was so convinced that we needed to stop population growth as quickly as possible that, as much as I love children, I decided not to have any of my own for the sake of all those being born to others. I wanted those other children to have a better chance at a healthy, happy life, and always figured I could adopt (and may still do so).

As the years passed, though, my understanding of the root causes of our ecological crisis changed. I found myself wondering if foregoing fatherhood was really necessary for me to responsibly address the very real issue of overpopulation. While a universal end to human childbearing would certainly solve the problem, I suspect that action plan wouldn't be met with a warm reception by very many people.

Of course, one might argue that those of us with an earnest desire to save the world are obligated to forego having children precisely because we are concerned about overpopulation when most folks are not, but I'm not sure that makes sense, either. If you believe, as I do, that our ecological problem is fundamentally a cultural problem, how can we solve it if only the people who don't think there's a problem raise children? How can we create a better future if we don't raise a generation of children who think about the world differently than my generation was raised to think of it?

I don't want to get lost wandering in my intellect here, though. Whatever rational reasons there are to do this or to do that, I find kids to be one of the greatest joys of my life. To never experience being a father to a child would leave my future hollowed out in an inconsolable way. For all my justifications, I admit my recent wavering may simply be a result of the fact that I just don't want to sacrifice that joy. It may all be a bunch of rationalization. If so, so be it. I haven't decided to have a child yet, but I am able to imagine doing so now.

While reconsidering my decision, I was also becoming increasingly aware of the other ecological issues related to having a child -- and that's where Having Faith came in. You see, it's no simple matter to conceive and carry to term a healthy baby these days. Because of the horrifically polluted condition of the world our global civilization has created, the journey from conception to birth and beyond has become a sort of perilous journey, with many unseen dangers threatening the well-being of a developing child.

Now, it would be bad enough if the harm from our lifestyles was only visited on our own innocent children; in a sense, that would serve us right. The brutal truth, however, is that the young of many other species in the community of life are at risk, too, as are the young of human cultures who have had nothing to do with the toxification of the world.

Tragically, parents don't know -- indeed, can't know -- with any certainty when and how these kinds of injuries occur, or even exactly what kind of injuries occur. Instead, they're simply forced to deal with the damage after the child is born, never knowing for sure what caused their child to be born with a cleft lip, malformed genitals, spina bifida, or some other birth defect. The damage isn't always so obvious at birth, either, as there's evidence that chemical exposures play a role in the development of childhood cancers, asthma, learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and other deadly and debilitating conditions.

Parents might also never learn that it's possible they could've done something to prevent the injuries. Some might call this ignorance a blessing because it averts the pain of guilt. Personally, I think it's a curse, because it ensures this same kind of damage will occur again and again to other children, other parents.

What kinds of dangers am I talking about? And why are developing human lives, first in utero, then while breastfeeding, so susceptible to them?

In the womb, young humans are highly susceptible to chemical harm because so much change and development occurs during those nine months. This process is coordinated by the endocrine system using hormonal messengers, and many of the chemicals that are either commonly used or created as byproducts of industrial processes are known endocrine disruptors -- substances that in some way interfere with the endocrine (hormonal) system.

Unfortunately, I don't think Ms. Steingraber addressed the issue of endocrine disruption in sufficient depth in her book. I think it's so important, though, that I encourage you to go to the website archive for Rachel's Environment & Health News and click on issue #750, "The Latest Hormone Science, Part 1." If that gets your attention, you can read the three subsequent installments at the same site.

Endocrine disruption is a tricky business, and dealing with it turns some of our assumptions about pollutant risks on their heads. For example, our pollution control regulations typically assume that the greater the dose of any pollutant, the greater the resulting damage. This isn't always the case with endocrine disruptors, however, for which tiny doses can have enormous effects while much larger doses can have no effect at all.

And then there's the issue of timing: An exposure to a particular endocrine disrupting chemical at one point in pregnancy can have no effect whatsoever, but should the same dose occur at a critical point in development, it can have devastating, lifelong effects. For more on these issues, jump back to the archive for Rachel's Environment & Health News and click on #754, "Paracelsus Revisited."

As already noted, the risks of exposure don't end at birth. Worse, in addition to being exposed to the same chemicals the rest of us are through the air, water, and soil, many infants and toddlers are exposed to toxic chemicals from a particularly heartbreaking source. You see, lactation is one of the few ways a female mammal can reduce her own body burden of bioaccumulated pollutants. Tragically, though, she passes these substances on to her child while nursing. In other words, when a mother is breastfeeding, she unintentionally detoxifies herself by poisoning her baby.

One's place in the birth order can make a huge difference, too. First children are breastfeeding from a mother's entire accumulated body burden of chemicals up to that point, while second children benefit from the fact that the mother has been partially detoxified by passing on part of her chemical body burden to her first child. If she has a third child, that child's exposure will likely be even less, and so on.

In the following passage, Sandra makes absolutely clear why breastfeeding children are the people most at risk from ecologically-persistent pollutants: "What fascinated me most (in my ecology textbooks) were the elegant black-and-white diagrams representing ecological food chains. One year, the arrows of energy flowed from sunlight to grass, from grass to cows, and from cows to milk. Another year, it was sunlight to diatoms, diatoms to crustaceans, crustaceans to smelt, smelt to mackerel, mackerel to tuna. In each of these diagrams, it is man, as a drinker of milk and eater of tuna fish, who occupied the top slot. At some point -- I don't remember when exactly -- the idea of biomagnification was introduced. This was Rachel Carson's (author of the ecological classic Silent Spring) big point, of course -- that long-lived toxic chemicals, such as chlorinated pesticides, do not remain diluted when they are broadcast out into the environment. Instead, they magnify -- are concentrated -- inexorably as they move up the food chain. Smelt to mackerel. Mackerel to tuna. Tuna to man.

"It was not until I studied ecology in college, however, that the underlying cause of this phenomenon became clear to me. Biomagnification follows from two laws of physics that appear in the front chapters of most elementary science books: the idea that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and the contrasting proposition that some amount of usable energy is always lost whenever it is transformed from one type to another. Taken together, these principles mean that fewer and fewer individuals can occupy each ascending link of the food chain because fewer and fewer calories (energy) are available to feed them. The total amount of a persistent pollutant (matter), however, doesn't change. Thus, as the rarer members of the higher links dine upon the commoners below them, poisons dispersed among the many are drawn up into the bodies of the few. This process of concentration can be described mathematically, and I spent a lot of hours working out such equations. As a general rule, persistent toxic chemicals concentrate by a factor of 10 to 100 with every link ascended.

"By the time I was teaching premedical biology as a graduate student, food chains and other topics of ecology were once again relegated to the back of the book -- and we almost never made it there by the end of the spring semester. My remaining connection to the concept of biomagnification was a yellowing poster displayed in a glass case outside the laboratory where I taught. It depicted the flow of DDT in a marine estuary, and at the top of the poster all the arrows ended, once again, with man, who was shown as a muscular male silhouette. But then a passing comment during an ecology seminar made me look at that poster more closely. 'Man,' a visiting professor intoned wryly, 'is not at the top of the food chain. His breastfed infants are.'

"Of course! After the tuna sandwiches and glasses of cow's milk are all consumed, there still remains one more chance for the contaminants they carry to magnify, and that takes place inside the breasts of nursing mothers, where the calories gleaned from food are transferred into human milk. The human food chain depicted on the bulletin board was missing an entire trophic level -- as was every other diagram I'd studied, from grade school to graduate school. The absent link was the last one, the top one, the one occupied by nursing babies.

"Why was the final link in the chain left out?"

Why indeed? If that passage doesn't gouge a pit right into your belly, you're more inured to the horrors of our way of life than I ever hope to be. One thing I need to make clear right now, though: All the expert sources I've seen say that breast milk, even though contaminated, is still superior to any formula substitute unless the mother has been exposed to an unusually high amount of toxic chemicals for some reason. Though breast milk isn't nearly as healthy as our children deserve these days, it's the evolved food of young humans, so its nutritional composition and immune-supportive properties will never be duplicated by formula.

What kinds of pollutants are commonly found in breast milk? Another passage:

"The very first report of breast milk contamination came in 1951, when DDT was discovered in the milk of black mothers living in Washington, D.C. The presence of PCBs in breast milk was first discovered in 1966, when, after finding traces of these chemicals in the tissues of a dead eagle, a Swedish researcher thought to test the milk of his own wife. By 1981, researchers had already identified 200 different chemical contaminants in the milk of U.S. mothers. Today, DDT (in the form of DDE, a metabolic breakdown product of DDT) still remains the most widespread contaminant in human milk around the world, and PCBs remain the most prevalent contaminant in the milk of mothers living in industrialized countries. In addition to DDT and PCBs, common contaminants of breast milk include flame retardants, fungicides, wood preservatives, termite poisons, mothproofing agents, toilet deodorizers, cable-insulating materials, dry-cleaning fluids, gasoline vapors, and the chemical by-products of garbage incineration."

And why isn't this common knowledge? From the book again:

"My office shelves contain stacks and stacks of published reports documenting the presence of environmental chemicals in human milk. All together they would fill a couple of large suitcases. But seldom do nursing mothers hear about them. Not only are our breastfed children omitted from popular depictions of the human food chain, but we ourselves are excluded from discussions of breast-milk contamination. Some researchers, public health officials, and lactation advocates argue in their defense that publicizing the problem would only serve to frighten women away from breastfeeding. But keeping secrets is seldom a good public health strategy, for how will we solve a problem whose existence we don't acknowledge?

"Here, in the back pages of my own book, I begin to cast about for a way to make visible the final ecological link of the human food chain. I am searching for words that will provoke courage instead of fear, conversation instead of silence. On the one hand we have the chemical adulteration of human milk. On the other is the bodily sacrament between mother and child. Can we speak of them both in the same breath? Can we look at one without turning away from the other?"

There's so much more I could quote here, but I trust this is sufficient to either grab your attention or send you scurrying off to denial. Having Faith is a deeply unsettling book, but I'm the kind of person who would rather know than not know the dangers, even when the knowing is painful.

I was disappointed that Steingraber didn't give much guidance to her readers regarding how parents can avoid this damage to their own child. I don't blame her for that, though, as the various sources I've seen have convinced me that no one really knows for sure how a couple can protect their young one as she's developing, first in mother's womb, then at mother's breast. So much of our exposure is inflicted on us, independent of our own lifestyle choices, that complete avoidance is impossible. I find myself asking the same question Steingraber's husband, Jeff, raises: "How come we're always the ones that have to do the abstaining?"

There are some things we can do to reduce exposure, however. Click here for the Environmental Working Group's recommendations. They seem generally sound to me based on my understanding of the issues, though I don't agree with the blanket recommendation for everyone to reduce consumption of "meat and high fat dairy products." Though I was a vegan for years, I've since been provisionally persuaded that we need a certain amount of animal fats for optimal nutrition, and I think these nutritional benefits outweigh the contamination risks just as with breast milk.

I'm not in a position to advise people in general how much animal fat to consume; we're all biochemically unique, so what works for you won't necessarily work for me. I also don't want anyone to think I'm suggesting that the standard American diet (SAD), which is high in animal fats, is healthy, because I'm not. As I understand it, the SAD is too high in saturated fats and trans-fats while too low in the essential polyunsaturated fats. While it's important to consider the total amount of fat--particularly if one is carrying too much weight for one's frame--I think it's even more crucial to eat a healthy balance of the different types of fats (for more on this, click here). Rather than seconding the EWG's recommendation on this point, I suggest instead that you choose to buy from farmers who pasture-feed their animals, do their best to avoid exposing the animals to persistent biocides, and refuse to administer antibiotics and hormones to promote growth.

In addition, there are actions we can all take to address the causes of the toxification of the world. Steingraber dealt with that issue in Having Faith, but I also found a relevant excerpt from the book posted at the site of an organization called Breast Cancer Action. And Steingraber offers this powerful vision for one way to demand change:

"I imagine, for example, thousands of pregnant women marching on Washington, demanding policies that are protective of fetal brain development, that allow us to eat freely up and down the food chain without worry, in keeping with our cultures, our family stories, and our dietary cravings. I imagine us singing new words to an old civil rights song: 'We shall not abstain!'"

I don't want to leave the impression that Having Faith is solely a horrifying call-to-action about all the pollutants that can cause harm to our babies. As I noted in the first paragraph, this is both a joyful and harrowing book, and it manages to be both because it's a profoundly personal memoir of one mother's journey from the discovery of her pregnancy through breastfeeding. Her fears about pollutant risks are inextricably interwoven with her great happiness about motherhood, and there are many passages here which were beautiful and moving for me. I also understand in a much more real way now what it's like to be pregnant than I ever have before.

I may or may not choose to conceive a child in the next few years, but I vow to spend the rest of my life helping to end the cultural system that is now poisoning all young life. I hope you'll make time to read Having Faith and choose to join me. I'm ready to march. Let me know when you are.

Additional resource:

The website for the book Our Stolen Future.