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I especially liked your point about using cost/benefit analysis. Yes, banning the pill would indeed fail a cost/benefit analysis test.
However, my point is that most environmentalists are treating this issue differently than the way they treat other issues.
Changing the arsenic standard for water from 50 ppb to 10 ppb would cost so much money that it would kill more people than it would save. (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13329-2001Apr12? la%20nguage=printer ) But most enviornmentalists ignore this cost/benefit analysis, and they want the 10 ppb standard. Their goal isn't to save lives. Instead, their real goal is to make themselves feel smug and morally superior, and they like to brag about how they supposedly "care." Anyone who opposes the 10 ppb standard is accused of "wanting to poison the water with arsenic, and wanting to kill people." Facts don't matter to these enviornmentalists. All they care about is emtotional rhetoric.
Government mandated recylcing wastes more resources than it saves. (Source: New York Times http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html ) But most enviornmentalists ingore this, because the real purpose here is to feed their own egos, not to help the environment.
In both of those examples, most environmentalists ignore the idea of cost/benefit analysis. In fact, many environmentalists don't even believe that there is such a thing as cost/benefit analysis. They don't believe that the concept even exists.
They are treating this birth control pill issue differently than the way that they treat other issues.
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