Grist, I know there are billions of existing kids out there and need to be educated as well as possible and probably many adoptive parents out there, bless their hearts, but aren't you being a bit hypocritical when writing about the problems with fertility? Did you forget that it's the HUMONGOUS HUMAN POPULATION that is causing such extreme imbalance and all of our environmental problems, including ubiquitous chemical exposure, or don't you read the articles you post?

We live in an era when human activity is overwhelming. We are destroying every inch of the planet, systematically and brutally killing off innocent wildlife by decimating/poisoning their habitats. And we are doing the same to ourselves.

The earth has a limited human carrying capacity and it was exceeded a long time ago. I believe there would not be an animal or plant that would not breathe a sigh of relief if humans were to vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow.

It doesn't take a population scientist to know that we don't need more people on this planet -- just someone with empathy for the other species we were supposed to be sharing this planet with.

How about encouraging folks to not have children or adopt??

     The primer was fine, but some supposedly healthy substitutes can cause their own problems.  
     A pregnant woman shouldn't eat too much soy.  It's a fairly powerful estrogen and can harm the growing fetus.  It's not persistent, so most of us don't have to worry about it, but persistence isn't necessarily much of an issue during pregnancy.  

Meat and dairy products have high levels of dioxin. A North American eating a typical omnivorous diet will receive 93% of their dioxin exposure from meat and dairy products.  Dioxin has been linked with birth defects and decreased fertility.

A 2001 study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health found that vegans had the lowest levels of dioxin compared to people who consumed fish, dairy and meat.

The section on persistent organic pollutants, POPs, implies that by not signing the UN Environmental Program treaty that the U.S. is still using POPs. Nothing could be further from the truth. These compounds have been babbed in the U.S. since the 1980s. They are not in the environment because they are eternally persistent, they are there because India, China, Russia, Pakistan and other developing countries still use them in tens of thousands of tons per year quantities.

Since toxaphene was banned in 1982, its concentration in Lake Superior, a lake who's volume of water would cover the U.S. to a depth of 6 feet, went up 50%. Lake Superior trout contain ten times as much toxaphene toxicity as PCB toxicity, yet, since 2004, fish consumption advisories are issued for PCBs, but not toxaphene.

In the Arctic, Inuit women consume 4 times the tolerable daily intake of toxaphene and 15 times a TDI of a coctail of other pesticides and PCBs in their seal based diet. They suffer infertility, stillbirths, birth defects and their children have severe immune system depression. A quarter of them suffer hearing damage from near constant colds and flus. See coldclearanddeadly.com  for more.

Also beware flouride in our drinking water AND the herbicides that our wonderful state and county governments are adding to our lakes and rivers in order to kill aquatic plants that are getting in the way of recreational use.  What are the long term effects of these?  Especially when they are using two and three chemicals in one body of water.  Water flows, it creates a chemical cocktail.  Is it safer to let kids swim in chlorinated pools these days than in the water?