By Carolanne Wright

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

With over 20 years experience helping women manage safe and successful home births in Utah and Idaho, U.S., Donna Young was shocked to deliver her first stillborn baby on May 8, 2013. When she attended the baby’s funeral service several days later, she noticed an unusually high number of infant grave sites at the cemetery — all with recent dates. Instead of turning a blind eye and brushing her observation off as an unfortunate coincidence, she decided to investigate.

Young lives in Vernal, Utah — a veritable gold rush of fracking activity. When Young began connecting the dots between fracking and the spike in newborn deaths, those involved with the industry didn’t take kindly to her questions.

Lives Destroyed

Before the hate campaign began against Young, she had between 18 to 25 clients a year, and a spotless, statewide reputation. All that changed once she began to question the harmfracking was causing to those most vulnerable: babies. Presently she’s down to five clients and she’s not sure how she’ll be able to manage her ranch if things don’t turn around. Young also sleeps with a gun after receiving death threats and having someone attempt to poison her livestock. Next were the nurses and doctors who warned pregnant women to steer clear of Young because she was incompetent. The implied message: she had killed babies and would kill theirs too.

Her crime? Questioning the high infant mortality rate in the valley. The town of Vernal is small, about 10,000 people. When she stumbled upon the fact that an inordinate number of babies were dying — at least 10 in 2013 alone — she sought information from county officials, to no avail. Young didn’t give up and continued to press the issue, eventually prompting TriCounty Health to sponsor a study in 2014 to evaluate the deaths. But Young and experts in Salt Lake City were convinced the study was designed to fail, especially since the study ignored facts pertaining to Vernal air pollution, where “ozone readings rivaled the worst days of summer in New York, Los Angeles or Salt Lake City; particulate matter as bad as Mexico City; and ground air fraught with carcinogenic gases like benzene, rogue emissions from oil and gas drilling,” writes Paul Solotaroff of Rolling Stone magazine.

He adds:

“[T]he Basin, which is bound on all four sides by mountains, is a perfectly formed bowl for winter inversions, in which 20-below weather clamps down on the valley and is sealed there by warmer air above it. During those spells, when the haze is visible and the air in one’s lungs is a cold chisel, the sun’s rays reflect off the snow on the ground and cook the volatile gases into ozone. The worst such period in the Basin’s recent history was the winter of 2012-13, when nearly all the Uintah mothers whose babies died were pregnant.”

The Uintah Basin is home to more than 11,000 fracking wells, which spew an enormous amount of soot and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into Vernal. With an inversion-filled winter, like the one in 2012-2013, the VOC count equates to the exhaust of 100 million cars.

TriCounty also overlooked research that links mothers’ exposure to polluted air with fetal problems like developmental disorders, birth defects and stillbirths. The conclusion of the study? The deaths were classified “not statistically insignificant.” When asked about possible causes for the deaths, Sam LeFevre, an epidemiologist with the Utah State Health Department who handled the study for TriCounty, suggested health problems of the mothers, including diabetes, prenatal neglect and smoking.

Which brings us back to Solotaroff, who rightly asks: “How many dead infants does it take before you’ll accept that there’s a problem?”

A Surge in Birth Defects and Miscarriages

Young not only saw a dramatic increase in stillborns around the winter of 2012-2013, but also a spike in birth defects as well. One girl was born with a rare and extreme vision disorder that requires the child to wear coke bottle glasses. This was the first baby with a birth defect that Young had delivered in all her years as a midwife. Several more followed in the next 15 months. A girl with a malformed epiglottis, which causes choking when she attempted to feed. A boy born tongue-tied and clubfoot; a girl tongue-tied and lip-tied. In all cases, surgeries were required within a few days of birth.

But this wasn’t the end of the tragedy. A few weeks after Solotaroff returned home from interviewing the people of Vernal, he received a call from Young, saying 4 of her 5 clients had miscarried within weeks of each other. Apparently, all the women who lost their babies lived in town and said their water tasted bad. Young went to the women’s houses and took samples, then employed a monitoring device used by drillers to test the water. Most were found positive for toxicity from hydrogen sulfide — an exceptionally deadly gas that’s often released by drilling. Small amounts of it can cause miscarriages.

The levels of hydrogen sulfide Young discovered in the samples were 7,000 times greater than the acceptable limit set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency.

When all is said and done, the bottom line is this: If we care about the health of the planet — and its inhabitants — fracking needs to end.

CONTINUE READING:

Previous articles by Carolanne Wright:

• From Stardom to Serving and Surrender: Hip Hop Artist Plants Seeds of Love in Uncertain Times
• Glyphosate Nation: Troublesome Roundup Herbicide Found Throughout U.S. Food Supply – Organics Too
• The Miracle of Cannabis Gives Back a Young Girl Her Life
• Is Roundup Driving The Autism Epidemic? Leading MIT Researcher Says YES
• Over 100 Scientific Studies Agree: Cannabis Annihilates Cancer
• Emotional Energetic Healing: The Future of Medicine is Here
• Why Every Parent Should Consider Unschooling
• The Greenhouse of the Future: Grow Your Own Food Year-Round With This Revolutionary System
• First U.S. City Produces More Electricity Than It Uses — With 100% Renewable Technology
• Dry Skin Brushing Can Strengthen Immunity, Spark Detoxification and Reverse Aging
• Autistic Boy with Higher IQ Than Einstein Discovers Gift After Removal from State-Run Therapy
• Enhance Spiritual, Mental and Physical Well-being with a Pineal Gland Detox
• DIY $2 Self-Watering Garden Bed – Grow Produce Easily, Even in the Toughest Conditions
• How Being Too Clean Can Lead to Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Celiac Disease and More

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