House and Senate Republicans have called for the Environmental Protection Agency to study whether the rising use of abortion pills is contaminating the nation’s water supply, citing concerns that the drugs may be contributing to infertility rates.
The letter, led by Sen. James Lankford and Rep. Josh Brecheen, both Oklahoma Republicans, asked the agency to examine potential contamination from mifepristone, a progesterone-blocker and the first drug in the two-pill abortion regimen.
“It is imperative that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers evaluating the potential contaminant effects of this drug as the agency develops the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule 6 (UCMR 6),” said the Wednesday letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, signed by 25 congressional Republicans.
The combination of mifepristone and misoprostol has become the most popular way to terminate a pregnancy, representing two-thirds of all U.S. abortions, but the procedures are typically conducted at home, with the aborted fetal tissue flushed down the toilet.
“With chemical abortion now the most common abortion method in America, the public deserves answers about how these potent hormone disruptors affect our water supply and contribute to our nation’s rising infertility rates,” Mr. Brecheen said in a statement.
The request comes less than six months after the Food and Drug Administration denied a petition submitted by Students for Life of America requesting a review of mifepristone’s impact on the environment.
Patrizia Cavazzoni, then-director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in her Jan. 3 response that the “actions you request in your petition are the same or substantially the same as the actions requested” in 2019 by two pro-life medical groups.
“Your petition does not provide any new data or evidence,” she said, according to a Jan. 6 report in Healthcare Finance.
The center’s 1996 environmental assessment found that mifepristone may enter the environment through patient excretions and medical waste, but that the drug could be “used and disposed of without any expected adverse environmental effects.”
In their letter, the Republicans noted that the assessment was conducted three decades ago, “long before the exponential rise in at-home chemical abortions and widespread use of mifepristone.”
“Despite the CDER’s acknowledgement that mifepristone enters the environment, the EPA has yet to review its potential contaminant effects,” said the letter. “We request that the EPA study the impact of the ‘byproducts’ of mifepristone, such as the active metabolites that are entering our nation’s water system and threatening access to safe drinking water.”
About 648,500 abortions were conducted via the pills in 2023, which does not include unrecorded abortions performed without the knowledge of a clinician, according to the letter.
“Federal regulators are rightfully eager to study the health effects of many chemicals in our water and septic systems, but they haven’t examined the environmental and public health risks of chemical abortion drugs like mifepristone in those same systems,” Mr. Lankford said.
“Scientific research on the health effects of water sources where there are trace amounts of a chemical that is designed to end the life of a child in the womb should not be controversial,” he added.
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins blasted the Biden administration for letting the drugs be prescribed online and delivered by mail without first checking “whether the chemically tainted blood, placenta tissue, and human remains now flushed into our waterways by the hundreds of thousands was harming the environment.”
“You don’t have to be pro-life to be concerned about endocrine disruptors in our waterways, potentially impacting our water safety, harming endangered species and our food supply, and perhaps even multiplying the rate of infertility,” she said in a statement.
The organization says on its website that “more than 40 tons of chemically-tainted medical waste — human tissue, placenta, and blood — are flushed into U.S. water systems each year due to Chemical Abortion Pills.”
