The contraceptive pill was polluting the environment and was in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said on Saturday.
The president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, said the pill ''has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature'' through female urine.
''We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,'' he said, without elaborating further.
''We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers,'' Mr Castellvi said.
The article was promptly dismissed by several organisations.
The vice-president of a contraceptive research association, Gianbenedetto Melis, said, ''Once metabolised, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones.''
Pope Benedict reaffirmed in October the Roman Catholic Church's condemnation of artificial birth control.
Contraception ''means negating the intimate truth of conjugal love, with which the divine gift [of life] is communicated'', the leader of the world's 1.1billion Roman Catholics wrote on the 40th anniversary of a papal encyclical on the topic.
The landmark document was published at a time when the development of the pill was giving new sexual freedom to women across the world.
Millions of Catholics distanced themselves from Rome as a result. AFP
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