So Much Regulation of Fluids and Emissions. Why Not Semen?

Earlier this year, three members of Congress introduced what they dubbed the Clean Water for All Life Act. Here’s how this law delivers “clean water for all:” Physicians must examine the bodies of all patients to whom they prescribe abortion medication — that’s in the office, no telemedicine allowed — and hand them a medical waste “catch kit” designed to keep blood, placental tissue, and embryonic remains out of the groundwater. Doctors who don’t comply face five years in prison.

This bill builds on a worry about contamination of water. As the prominent conservative nonprofit Heritage Foundation has written, unpleasant content travels from “America’s toilets to the water supply.” Wastewater treatment technology, says Heritage, “can reduce but never fully remove” inclusions that pollute the fluid we swallow and bathe in. 

Quite the turn by an organization that denies climate change and published a notorious blueprint for regulatory rollback that includes slashing EPA powers, ending ozone emission initiatives, and expanding “drill, baby, drill” opportunities. On water in particular, Heritage has a plan to dismantle (p. 664) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Grill the Pill,” says Heritage when it’s in an environmentalist mood, arguing that synthetic estrogen from birth control reaches the water supply through urine. Heritage has brought up “male fish growing female genitals” to justify a crackdown on endocrine disruptors. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is listening. Its head, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks of “a soup of toxic chemicals” that threatens the maleness of American boys. 

Liquids fill many of these alarms. Urine is a fluid flush (so to speak) with excreted hormones. Maybe blood too: When Students for Life deplored “50 tons of chemically tainted blood,” it boasted that it had the ear of the Environmental Protection Agency. In June, Republican attorneys general from 14 states along with 19 members of Congress joined the groundwater outcry of Heritage and RFK Jr. and the Clean Water for All Life Act when they urged the EPA to label mifepristone a threat to clean water. Multiple agencies regulate the human placenta as a water contaminant.

Now that we’re mindful of substances that disrupt when they flow, we ought to learn from the abundant precedents in water cleanup and enhancement. While researching Making the Best of Semen, I learned about the depth and breadth of American ingenuity in fluid regulation. RFK Jr. himself could have written some of my chapter called “Water Regulation Informs Semen Regulation.” As his bio on the HHS website brags, Kennedy started his career at a nonprofit called Riverkeeper and co-founded another organization called Waterkeeper Alliance. 

Perfect. Semen, blood, and urine share traits with water that pertain to regulation. Every liquid travels when it’s not contained, and its travel always imposes consequences. Federal rules about water safety and quality offer a role model for semen regulation. 

Secretary Kennedy’s water expertise and his current gig suggest specifics pertinent to a question I take up in my book: What could it mean to regulate semen? Kennedy likes to tell people what to do on the reproduction front. His outreach extends to all stages of babymaking. 

He and the President have warned against acetaminophen ingested in pregnancy, urging sufferers to endure pain instead of seeking relief. That’s the “during” stage. Kennedy becomes more fluid-minded when he addresses pregnancy’s “before” and “after.” He denounces current birth rates as a crisis: Anyone who thinks the native-born birthrate is too low necessarily thinks semen needs to land more impactfully on the nation’s mucosa. The public health stance for which Kennedy is best known encourages parents at the “after” stage of babymaking to refuse or delay the injection of a fluid into the infant that their shared journey of semen created.

“Make Semen Healthy Again” might sound like a slightly smutty wisecrack, but I am not kidding. Secretary Kennedy says almost that when he identifies falling sperm counts as a metric for a larger decline. That lament adverts more to quantity than quality, but sperm quality is central to reproductive fitness. For example, autism, a pathology that occupies Kennedy and his President, is linked much more strongly to unhealthy sperm than the painkiller they prefer to blame. 

To improve sperm, improve semen. Visible, tangible, and replete with hazardous inclusions, semen is more in reach of intervention than little gametes we cannot see without a microscope. Enhancing semen in addition to sperm offers more health, because as a fluid semen adds consequences distinct from what sperm can achieve. Semen provides a notably nurturing environment for viruses. HIV gets especially coddled and protected by semen in contrast to other liquid homes; Ebola is a strong runner-up.  

Action to improve semen aligns nicely with Make America Healthy Again and the Kennedy/Heritage/Trump focus on the intersection of emitted fluids and personal responsibility. If individuals who ingest hormonal contraceptives or abortion pills are causing emissions-related consequences to others that call for government intervention, then persons whose bodies produce, discharge, and receive semen deserve the same concern.

Observers of MAHA have pointed out that this movement would accomplish more if it paid attention to systemic deliverers of pollution. The Make Semen Healthy Again subdivision of the initiative could learn from that idea. Start with “Impact of Environmental Factors on Human Semen Quality and Male Fertility,” a paper about semen whose listed sources of harm include factories, agricultural pesticides, and exhaust from motor vehicles.

Seize the day, Team Trump. You have established a foundation for reproductive-emission regulation. You are already monitoring blood, urine, abortion detritus, liquids that hold vaccines, and the groundwater. Regulate one more fluid.