Senate Democrats pressure EPA to drop abortion pill water quality study

Senate Democrats are pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to drop its study on the presence of abortion pill chemicals in the water supply, which they argue is driven by anti-abortion politics rather than sound science.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and 45 of their Democratic colleagues sent a letter on Thursday to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to remove the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from the list of medications that the agency monitors in drinking water.The EPA announced in early September that mifepristone and misoprostol would be included among a list of more than 1,400 other chemicals as part of a new water quality Non-Targeted Analysis study, an assessment method that can identify thousands of possible pollutants at a time. Murray, Schumer and their colleagues said in the letter the agency’s inclusion of mifepristone and misoprostol in the study is part of a “radical, anti-science campaign” from anti-abortion advocates seeking to restrict access to abortion drugs. “This study is a departure from the EPA’s historic role in protecting our water and air from actual threats to human health and the environment,” the senators wrote. “Instead, this study opens the door to new attacks on safe and accessible reproductive health care, undermining the safety and privacy of patients around the country.”Roughly two-thirds of the more than 1 million abortions each year in the United States involve abortion drugs. Most mifepristone abortions were prescribed via telehealth appointments and occur at home.The proliferation of at-home abortions has been a mobilizing force for the hard-line anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, the leading advocate for studying mifepristone’s effects on water quality.Since 2022, Students for Life has filed five citizen petitions with the Food and Drug Administration, asking the agency to restrict access to the drug and arguing FDA approval of the drug for at-home use violates the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and individual states’ Water Quality Standards.In July, Students for Life published a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine confirming the presence of active mifepristone metabolites, or waste particles, in drinking water in three different urban areas. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, said at the time that her group’s work was submitted to Zeldin “within minutes of learning the paper was published online.” Two months later, mifepristone and misoprostol were included in the EPA’s NTA study. In the letter to Zeldin, Murray and her colleagues singled out the advocacy of Students for Life as the chief instigator of the environmentalist push against mifepristone but did not reference the recently published scientific paper.“No credible evidence shows mifepristone is a threat to America’s drinking water, but there’s plenty of evidence that anti-abortion groups have been asking EPA to concoct bogus studies that say otherwise,” the senators wrote. “Taxpayers fund EPA to protect their health and the environment, not to advance a political campaign against women’s health care.”Students for Life spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick told the Washington Examiner that being highlighted in the letter is “flattering, in a way,” but the senators’ portrayal of the underlying science is “categorically false.”“Logic alone would indicate that if you dump more than 50 tons of pathological medical waste into our drinking water every year problems would result,” Hamrick said. “Hospitals and brick-and-mortar abortion vendors can’t do that, so why are we ignoring a potential environmental crisis?”An EPA spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that including mifepristone and misoprostol in the NTA study “is not a ‘surveillance’ effort” as the Senate letter suggests.“EPA understands that Americans have concerns about the safety of their drinking water and the potential presence of contaminants and the Trump EPA believes Americans have a right to know what they are drinking, providing to their children and elderly parents, and using to mix formula for infants, which is why the agency initiated the Non-Targeted Analysis study,” the EPA spokesperson said. The agency spokesperson also clarified the study “does not focus on any individual contaminant” and is also detecting the presence of more than 250 other pharmaceutical or personal care products. NTA studies also do not measure the percentage of pollutants in a given water sample but rather only whether the chemical is present.Hamrick also said supporting transparency about chemicals in drinking water does not require being anti-abortion.“You don’t have to be pro-life to want clean drinking water or to not want a microdose of an endocrine blocker in your tap water,” Hamrick said.WAS TRUMP RIGHT TO DOWNPLAY ABORTION?The Senate oversight letter could signal that securing the status of abortion pills could be a top priority for Democrats should they win control of the upper legislative chamber in the November midterm elections. Senate Democratic leadership requested that Zeldin provide the agency’s rationale for the study and a timeline of expected completion by Oct. 31. The coalition also requested all correspondence between agency staff and Students for Life since January 2025.