Abortion pills in America’s water supply: Republican AGs call for the EPA to investigate possible contamination

In addition to killing unborn children in the womb and exposing their mothers to potentially fatal health risks, the abortion pill mifepristone might be contaminating America’s water supply.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration claimed when the drug was approved 26 years ago that mifepristone — which “may enter the environment from excretion by patients, from disposal of pharmaceutical waste, or from emissions from manufacturing sites” — would have a negligible environmental impact.

‘It risks contaminating the very water supply millions of Americans drink every day.’

Whereas medical abortions accounted for only 6% of all abortions in the formal U.S. health care system in the year immediately following mifepristone’s approval, that number climbed to 53% in 2020 and again to 63% in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Given the drug’s massively increased use in recent years and the coinciding loosening of relevant regulations, a coalition of 14 state attorneys general is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether mifepristone has contaminated American waters and adversely impacted public health — especially the health of expectant mothers.

The coalition’s recent letter to the EPA states that while the FDA promulgated a regimen and risk evaluation and mitigation strategy when mifepristone was first approved, “The FDA has eliminated many of the protections that minimized the health risks posed by mifepristone and its approved generics, including the in-person dispensing and check-up requirements that kept medical staff involved in the process.”

In addition to the FDA dropping these protections, the coalition noted that regulations have been greatly relaxed, paving the way for far more “chemical abortions occurring in the home” and resulting, in turn, “in tons of chemically tainted medical waste being flushed into American waterways.”

Aid Access, a group that works with registered abortion providers who provide abortion pills, states on its website, “It is best to flush everything [placenta, embryo, and blood] down the toilet or to wrap the sanitary pads in a plastic bag.”

RELATED: Colorado Democrats really want college women to abort the next generation

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The death of hundreds of thousands of children via medical abortions every year has “serious implications for the Safe Drinking Water Act,” said the coalition’s letter, not only because conventional wastewater treatment is not designed to remove the contaminants involved but because “the metabolites in mifepristone and its approved generics remain active post-excretion, meaning they ‘retain [their] considerable affinity towards the human progesterone and glucocorticoid receptors’ after disposal.”

The coalition expressed concern that if the mifepristone entering the American water supply reaches a sufficient concentration, then pregnant women who unwittingly ingest the drug may disproportionately suffer health complications.

After all, the drug harms an existing pregnancy by inhibiting the actions of progesterone at progesterone-receptor sites and promoting both uterine contractions and a softening of the cervix, according to the National Library of Medicine’s Hazardous Substances Data Bank.

The Republican state attorneys general — hailing from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas — have asked for the EPA to add mifepristone and its generics to the Contaminant Candidate List — “a list of drinking water contaminants that are known or anticipated to occur in public water systems and are not currently subject to EPA drinking water regulations.”

“The health of pregnant women and Americans everywhere may depend on it,” said the letter.

“As medical waste is discarded and washed away, it risks contaminating the very water supply millions of Americans drink every day, and the long-term consequences could be severe,” Alabama AG Steve Marshall said in a statement on Wednesday.

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