Generally speaking, the Right doesn’t tend to care too much about the environment. After all, it would just be rude to suggest that God would even make a planet that we could harm or that he’s not coming to vacuum them all into heaven and destroy the world any day now. As Ann Coulter once said, ever so elegantly, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.’”
Plus there’s a lot of money in not giving a fuck about it.
And yet, they have recently found one environmental concern they can get behind — abortion water! Yes, by sheer coincidence, having nothing at all to do with their personal desire to force women to have babies against their will, America’s most fervent anti-abortion-rights advocates are very concerned about what abortion pills are doing to the soil our drinking water.
Either that or they think it’s one way to get the pill banned or even to get people who don’t think the government should get involved in people’s personal reproductive choices to join their side of things.
Just a few months ago, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin (what a weird sentence fragment to type) denied to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) having any interest or knowledge about the EPA planning to investigate the effects of mifepristone and misoprostol in the water.
However! The EPA recently announced its plan for a “cutting edge scientific study” to test America’s drinking water for over 1000 possible contaminants from pharmaceuticals, pesticides and more — including mifepristone, misoprostol, and hormones from birth control.
“It is exciting after a very long journey that’s been almost 10 years, to have this be taken seriously enough to be on an official list,” Kristi Hamrick, head of policy at Students for Life of America (SFLA), said, according to The Hill. “But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot of information that we need, for it to be useful for people to know.”
Basically, their “theory” is that when people who take the pills go to the bathroom afterwards, traces of the medication gets into our water supply and affect the fertility of those who drink it. Except that is not at all how anything works. The human body metabolizes the drugs to the point where any amount that would be excreted into the water would be entirely negligible and have no effect on anything whatsoever. An EPA study (from back when it was run by normal people) found that it would take “months to decades” of a person drinking two liters of raw, untreated sewage a day to get anything close to an actual dose of any of the most commonly prescribed drugs.
The EPA’s test, notably, will not get into whether or not these trace contaminants are in any way harmful to people, just whether or not they are in the water to begin with, which is not actually all that helpful. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, there is “no evidence that medication abortion is affecting U.S. water systems, including drinking water and aquatic wildlife.”
But they’re going for it anyway! Why? Because they want to ban abortion medication.
From The Hill:
“This is kind of end-running the whole Safe Drinking Water Act required monitoring program, and going directly to an unprecedented fishing expedition,” said Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water who left during the first Trump administration.
“I don’t think in any stretch of the imagination [EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin] is planning for this 10-year process to take place to put a drinking water standard out for mifepristone. I think he’s planning to use the immediate results to try to get FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to take it off the market,” Southerland said.
The test, conveniently, would also allow the government agency a peek into abortion pill usage in areas where abortion is currently banned, fueling the fire for those who want to ban telehealth abortions that allow women in those states to get the pill through the mail.
One of the major voices pushing this nonsense has been conservative influencer Isabel Brown. Back in May, Brown asked her Instagram audience, “What if I were to tell you that every time you fill up a glass of water at your kitchen sink from the tap, you were actually *drinking* someone else’s abortion — both the pills that started the process, and the human remains that were flushed down the toilet?”
Well, she would pretty much be full of shit. Just like she would literally have to be in order to be able to be affected by abortion pills in tap water.
The point, of course, is to gross people out and scare them. I suppose, in the same vein, she could suggest that we are all drinking fecal matter and menstrual fluid and Viagra and “human remains” from natural miscarriages, but she’s not doing that. She’s not worried about data centers using up all of our water. She’s not worried about any other form of pollution or any other environmental concerns. Indeed, in the very interview she posted to Instagram, she posits it as a way to attack abortion medication, directly telling Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life that “one of the other major policy areas I think we could make a dramatic change tomorrow in the distribution of abortion pills is in how it’s impacting our water.”
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There are actually a number of environmental contaminants that we know affect fertility, that we know can result in higher miscarriage rates. PFAS plastics (“forever chemicals”) have been shown to “harm fertility, raise preeclampsia risk, and increase preterm birth.” Air pollution has been found to cause “men to experience relentlessly decreasing sperm count and function while women are suffering progressively worse anovulation, impaired implantation, and loss of fetal viability.” Climate change, which we know they don’t believe in, has been found to be a likely cause of reduced fertility.
Are they worried about any of those things? They are not. Because dealing with any of those issues, apart from being an affront to Ann Coulter’s God, will do nothing to further their agenda of making abortion illegal. Sort of like how they don’t give a shit about babies once they are born. They are, however, also concerned about the effects of birth control on the water, because they don’t want women taking birth control, either — or turning the frogs gay.
The bad act is not polluting the water, it is having sex for reasons other than procreation and then refusing to accept the “consequences.” God is out here trying to correctively punish sexually active women with pregnancies, so that their ruined lives can be a message to all other women out there who might want to have sex for non-procreative reasons.
The fact that our tax money is going towards providing these idiots with PR material and validation is positively absurd. The idea of “testing” the water for these things without also determining if they are actually harmful in any way is pointless. The fact is, if there were a way to purify the water to the point where none of these chemicals could be traced, it would not matter to these people or their cause — which is not keeping our water clean, but leveraging other people’s desire for clean water to their own ends.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
“It would take “months to decades” of a person drinking two liters of raw, untreated sewage a day to get anything close to an actual dose of any of the most commonly prescribed drugs.”
Sounds like a dare to RFK
I love how our society is being run by insane people.