Women on Contraceptive Pill Should Pay $1,500 a Year More Tax
I agree that this sounds entirely absurd, that women who take the contraceptive pill should pay £1,000 ($1,500) a year more in tax, but it is the inevitable outcome of the standard logic that the polluter should pay. We do have to make a couple of assumptions of course, the first being that the European Union has got its science right, the second that they have got their costs right. But if they have then yes, the end result really is that women should be charged a higher tax for using the contraceptive pill.
The basic problem is that the hormones in the pill itself, the hormones which produce the desired contraceptive effect, then end up in the sewage system as part of the normal function of kidneys and bladders in human beings. Those hormones are then not captured by the standard sewage treatments and end up being released into the fresh water of the area. Where they are believed to cause sex changes in fish:
Ethinyl estradiol (EE2), the main active ingredient of contraceptive pills, can trigger a condition known as intersex in freshwater fish, which has caused significant drops in populations in many species – although no links have yet been made with human health.
So the proposal is that sewage treatment systems should be upgraded to deal with this. Perhaps fair enough, but what is the cost?
Achieving that target will not be easy, as Owen and Jobling point out in a recent issue of Nature. They calculate that, for a town of about 250,000 people, it would cost about £6m to install a system that uses granular activated carbon to cut EE2 levels, with a further £600,000 being needed to operate the system each year. To upgrade the 1,400 sewage waterworks in England and Wales would cost a total of more than £30bn, they add.
Let us leave aside that capital cost. Look purely at the running costs of such a system, some 10% of the capital cost. That’s £3 billion a year for England and Wales, and in that country there are some 2.5 million women using the pill. That looks a little low to me so just to make the math easier we’ll say 3 million. Or the running costs alone of such a system will be £1,000 ($1,500) a year for each and every women who uses the pill to regulate her fertility.
Where are we to find that money from? It is suggested that the manufacturers of the pill should pay:
Nor is it necessary that the public should pick up the tab, added Owen. “The pharmaceutical industry makes billions out of the drugs and treatments it sells. If these pollute the environment, what is wrong with making them pay to have it cleaned up?”
That, sadly, is near insane. The price to the NHS of the pill is of the order of £3-£5 a month, call it £50 a year tops. It is clear and obvious that Big Pharma is not making 20 times a year more profits than they actually charge. So it isn’t going to be the profits of Big Pharma that pay for such a clean up. Or if it is, suddenly the pill is going to cost £1,050 a year to the NHS. Which, given that the pill is free on the NHS just means that the taxpayer is going to pay.
Or, of course, the taxpayer can pay directly, simply shovel the money from the Treasury out to the water companies to pay these extra costs. Or we could even raise water bills for everyone to pay these extra costs.
But that isn’t what we actually say should happen, is it? In general we say that the polluter should pay, the polluter should pay the costs of cleaning up the pollution they cause. BP has to pay to clean up the waters of the Gulf after Macondo: we all think this is just and righteous. GE should pay to clear up PCBs in the Hudson River: certainly there are many on the left and in the green movement who think this is right and just.
Which brings us to: well, it is women taking the contraceptive pill who are causing this pollution. It is their choice to use the pill (and quite obviously they have every right to regulate their fertility). However, their choice of method of doing so imposes costs on the rest of us, upon the society at large. This really is pollution and yes, we do have this general assumption that the polluter should pay for having polluted.
Thus we come to the inescapable conclusion that women who use the contraceptive pill should be charged £1,000, or $1,500, a year for having done so. We cannot charge BP for killing fishies through pollution if we don’t also charge others who kill fishies through pollution, can we?
Another way of putting this is that the full cost to society of the contraceptive pill is not the £50 the taxpayer pays for it, but that plus the £1,000 to clean up the water: thus is £1,050 in total.
We might indeed say that women have a right to control their fertility: I most certainly do. But there are a number of alternative methods, various barriers, creams, sponges, IUDs, which do not carry this environmental cost. Those who choose to use this specific method should, at least if we are to be consistent about polluter pays, thus be bearing this extra environmental cost. An environmental cost that the other methods do not have.
Thus, as I say, women on the pill should be charged an extra £1,000 a year in taxes.
There are ways out of this conclusion. We could abandon polluter pays for example: that rather goes against the grain of the last few decades of environmental law really though, doesn’t it?
We could argue that the damage to the fish just isn’t worth worrying about: again, that’s rather contrary to the modern mantra that nature must be left pristine, without, if at all possible, any marker of human presence.
Other than those two I’m afraid that I really cannot see any way around the basic conclusion. The pill pollutes thus those who use the pill should pay the costs of their pollution. |
