Anti-abortion advocates are using a new strategy in their efforts to limit or ban the use of the abortion drug mifepristone. In July, the Environmental Protection Agency published in the Federal Register a Rule Proposal (full text) to require certain public water systems to collect occurrence data for 30 contaminants not currently covered by federal regulations. In an August 20 press release, Liberty Counsel announced that it has submitted to the EPA a 65-page Comment (full text) on the proposed rule. The Comment urges the EPA to add the abortion drug mifepristone as one of the contaminants that water systems must screen for. The press release summarized the Comment Letter in part as follows:
In the comment, LCA points to the widespread and increasing use of chemical abortion drugs at home, which accounts for approximately 700,000 chemical abortions annually. These at-home abortions are polluting U.S. water systems and drinking water through human excretion, aborted human fetal remains, and related medical waste expelled and flushed into America’s wastewater systems. These expulsions contain mifepristone’s active metabolites which the wastewater systems are not designed to filter out.
Mifepristone deserves heightened scrutiny because no other FDA approved drug has been designed and approved to be lethal in nature by starving a baby in the womb. The drug’s biologically active metabolites also have “long half-lives” and retain the “considerable” ability of the parent drug to block the vital fertility hormone progesterone, which makes the metabolites operate as “endocrine disruptors”....
