Pollution is shrinking penises and messing up women’s fertility, according to study
There are several reasons why we should take care of the environment. Here’s an addition to the list: pollution can affect a person’s fertility—including the size of the human penis.
In her book "Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race," Dr. Shanna H. Swan wrote that our pollutants in the environment and our use of industrial chemicals in everyday products are tied to lower sperm count and smaller penises.
Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist, previously co-authored a study in 2017 where she found that sperm count among men fell by a staggering 50% from 1973 to 2011.
In her new book, Swan wrote that the reason for the current low sperm is the chemicals in our environment, as well as our “unhealthy practices in our modern world.”
“(These are) causing various degrees of reproductive havoc,” Swan wrote in her book, as published by Vice.
Chemicals, pollutants, and our unhealthy practices don’t just affect sperm count. They also affect semen quality and women’s fertility. These can lead to the shrinking of penis size and the volume of the testes.
To illustrate it further, Swan wrote that somewhere in the world an average woman in her 20s is less fertile than her grandmother, while a man might have a lower sperm count than his grandfather.
Swan considers this a “global existential crisis.”
“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival. Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered, only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three,” she wrote.