My wife was right

My wife is a holistic physician, and we try to raise our children green. We know first hand that it is getting harder (and at times, frankly, it is terrifying) to raise healthy children in our increasingly toxic world.

Despite my doctor-wife's early awareness about some of the toxins our children were being exposed to, I really didn’t understand what she was worried about. Honestly, at times I thought it was overanxious mothering. I trusted that the government and its various agencies (the FDA, the EPA, the CDC) were going to keep our children safe. Boy, was I wrong.

The light bulb went off when I was sitting by the fire one cold winter morning with my twin daughters. I was reading them a children's book about trying to rescue a trapped whale when an old college friend came to visit. My friend was a public health doctoral student, and she began telling me about environmental threats that I had never heard of before. The strange term she used was endocrine disruption (the disruption of our hormonal system). At the time, I didn't really understand that hormones control everything from our mood to our physiology, and that their disruption is causing widespread health problems—from birth defects to infertility to prostate cancer to autism. I was shocked by what she was saying and couldn't believe I hadn't heard about it. I also knew that her son had a birth defect and that so many of my friends were having difficulty conceiving or carrying children to term, or were dealing with birth defects or autism. It was also, I would later learn, contributing to the incredible rise in prostate and breast cancer.

What, I wondered, were we doing to ourselves and to our children? What was causing all of these health problems? I had to know. I have spent the last three years writing a eco-thriller (Eye of the Whale) that attempts to put the puzzle pieces together, a journey that has allowed me to work with many of the world’s leading scientists to find out what is happening to our children and our planet. My wife was right to be worried. American children are now born with close to three hundred toxic industrial chemicals in their bodies. I also learned that beluga whales in the remote Hudson Bay are so filled with these same industrial chemicals that when their dead bodies wash up on shore, they must be handled like toxic waste. Chemical pollution, it turns out, is a threat to human and environmental health perhaps as great as global warming. Indeed, what global warming is doing to our climate, endocrine disruption is doing to our bodies.

There is a great deal of hope and opportunity in what I discovered, as well. That’s why I support the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign. We can’t deal with this problem as individuals any more than one person can stop climate change. Congress needs to act decisively, and soon, if we are going to start reversing this troubling trend. I hope you’ll join me and other parents who want a healthy planet for our children to inherit.

Douglas Abrams
Santa Cruz, California