(LifeSiteNews) – The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced a “cutting-edge study” to better identify more contaminants that may be in America’s drinking water, including longstanding concerns about the abortion drug mifepristone.
In a September 9 press release, the EPA announced the “groundbreaking new research by EPA scientists goes beyond traditional testing methods to screen for a broad array of pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, PFAS, and more than 1,000 potential contaminants.” The agency says Non-Targeted Analysis “can identify unknown pollutants present in a drinking water sample,” as opposed to standard testing methods that “measure a handful of specific chemicals at a time.”
Politico reports that the thousand-plus new contaminants will include mifepristone and the companion abortion drug misoprostol, though the testing “will only show whether a particular medication or chemical is present in the water, not its concentration or whether it poses a risk to human, animal or plant life.” But pro-lifers say it represents a major step forward in something activists have been urging for years.
In June, the attorneys general of 14 states urged the EPA to add mifepristone to its Draft Contaminant Candidate List, which contains substances “currently not subject to any proposed or promulgated national primary drinking water regulations” but to be considered for further investigation, citing the agency’s statutory responsibility to “identify the contaminants most harmful to ‘sensitive subgroups,’ including ‘pregnant women.’”
In June 2025, Liberty Counsel Action published an 86-page report that examined a wide variety of records and research to find serious deficiencies in the oversight of how the abortion industry disposes of its “medical waste,” starting with a fateful erroneous prediction in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s original approval of mifepristone that the drug would only have a minimal environmental impact, with the question of disposal largely overlooked, both from chemical byproducts of the pills themselves to the flushing of aborted remains down users’ own toilets after use.
The authors cited one estimate from Students for Life’s “This Is Chemical Abortion” initiative that “‘as much as “40+ tons of chemically-tainted medical waste – human tissue, placenta, and blood’ (aborted babies and related byproducts) are flushed into our waterways,” a problem that most state and local regulations fail to account for, effectively allowing the abortion pill business to “use wastewater treatment plants as their de-facto medical waste facilities for decades.”
The report noted that the EPA itself explains that standard wastewater treatment facilities “are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals.” LC Action added that “wastewater treatment plants are not intended to process fetal remains (medical waste facilities exist for this purpose), though they end up serving in this capacity as fetal remains from chemical abortions are often flushed into the sewer system.
The consequences for individuals who unknowingly drink the tainted water are unknown, but one potential effect could be infertility, given the fact that mifepristone blocks the fertility hormone progesterone.
Abortion pills have become the abortion industry’s most important tactic for perpetuating abortion-on-demand in pro-life states without Roe v. Wade. Pro-lifers are still waiting to see if the Trump administration will restore the requirement that they only be dispensed in-person, rather than by mail order, after a long-awaited review of the pills’ safety data is complete after the November midterm elections.