The letter warns that the increase of at-home abortion is a serious risk to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) as chemically tainted medical waste is flushed into the water system.
The letter mentions that not only are the metabolites in mifepristone still active after exiting the body, but regular water waste treatment is not equipped to remove such contaminants.
The AGs petition the EPA to add mifepristone to their Contaminant Candidate List (CCL), which identifies contaminants in the drinking water that are known or anticipated to occur. The SDWA requires the EPA to update the list ever five years, and some contaminants might require new regulation under the act.
Hanaway spoke on “Washington Watch” about the growing amount of chemically tainted waste, including aborted babies, being flushed into American waterways.
According to a study in 2023 by the Guttmacher Institute, 63% of abortions were medication abortions. Hanaway says that includes only the abortions that are known, not the ones where mifepristone is illegally mailed into pro-life states.
“Without a physician's oversight we don't know what's happening to the medical waste from the abortions, and frankly we don't know what's happening to the medications,” says Hanaway. “You know, some of these women may, after receiving it in the mail, decide not to use it and end up flushing it into the systems — in which case it's coming in, and its full concentration.”
The drug works by making the uterine lining inhospitable to a baby, she explains, so a fetus can’t survive. Hanaway says that the worst thing in her mind is a woman who wants a child drinking the contaminated wastewater and losing her baby as a result.
Contaminated water is also creating, she says, infertility issues.
“I just can't even imagine how sad you would be if you were somebody who had been trying for a long time to have a child and got pregnant, and then an abortion was caused by your drinking water,” she said.
It’s unclear how the abortion drugs affect young girls going through puberty, Hanaway said.
The AGs want the FDA to go back and require physician supervision for the dispensing of the drug. In 2023, the Biden Administration FDA removed that requirement.
However, the letter is addressed to the EPA. All they are asking for now, she says, is for the agency to take a hard look at this chemical’s effects, if it is causing abortions or infertility in women.
“We want the EPA to make sure that it's one of the substances that we're cleaning out of our water. The EPA has all kinds of standards for the quality of our drinking water,” says Hanaway. “To me, taking out a chemical that is literally lethal to human life should be a no-brainer, and that's I think why so many other Republican AGs have joined me on this letter.”
