Just Wait Until These Anti-Abortion Freaks Find Out What Else Goes In The Toilet
They are worried about 'drinking other people's abortions.'
Ever since Roe was overturned, women in states where abortion is illegal have relied on telehealth prescriptions from providers in other states in order to get abortion medication. Anti-abortion zealots, unsurprisingly, have not liked this very much, and have been doing all they can to try to force those who do not want to have babies to have them anyway. Earlier this month, Texas’s HB7 went into effect, aimed at making it illegal for doctors in other states to prescribe abortion meds to Texas residents. However, many of these doctors have publicly stated that they will absolutely keep prescribing these medications to Texas residents, and they’re protected by shield laws in their own state, so there is not a damn thing Texas can do about it.
They’ve also been on a real tear about the “safety” of mifepristone — see Senator Bill Cassidy on Face The Nation this weekend — a drug that has been safely used for over three decades at this point, in hopes of making it more difficult for people to access the medication and therefore more difficult to have abortions. You know, as if we all do not know that there are a whole lot of medications out there with far worse side effects. After all, when was the last time any of us got through a network TV show without seeing 87 pharmaceutical drug commercials with 742 side effects apiece?
Part of this has been a campaign by Students for Life of America to get the EPA to add mifepristone to the list of chemicals tracked by public utilities. Why? Mostly because they want to convince people that it is unsafe so they will stop using it for abortions.
Naturally, rather than going on any kind of actual study or tests or otherwise reliable information, the Students for Life are doing what Republicans traditionally do in the realm of scientific inquiry: they are going based on vibes alone. They don’t like abortion medication, therefore it must be a health risk for it to be in the water. Sort of like how so many people on the Right have decided that vaccines must be unsafe because the people they don’t like believe that vaccines work, that polluting the environment (in other ways) must be good because the people they don’t like say it is harmful, or that COVID restrictions were unnecessary because they didn’t enjoy them.
Via Politico:
By aligning their new campaign with the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda and its concerns about the impact of chemicals on human health, the group hopes their efforts will convince the Trump administration to restrict access to the drug or, at minimum, shape public opinion about its safety.
“People need to understand that they are likely drinking other people’s abortions,” said Student for Life’s head of policy Kristi Hamrick. “Do you really need a test to determine that it’s a bad idea to flush placenta, tissue, blood and human remains into our waterways?”
Drinking other people’s abortions.
Just wait until Kristi finds out about menstruation. Or about any of the many other things that get flushed down toilets on the regular. She’ll be out here accusing us all of coprophagia.
It will probably not surprise you to hear that Ms. Students for Life does not actually care about the environment or our drinking water — if she did, one imagines she would have thought that one out better — and that she has previously flat-out admitted that this is a disingenuous ploy to get people to see the drug as dangerous.
Via Politico:
“This is not because the environment was my first weapon of choice — it’s because it’s the one we have now,” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of Students for Life of America, said at the group’s annual conference on Saturday. She added that after decades of pushing for new restrictions on abortion by approaching state and federal lawmakers saying, “Please, please pass this law to help us. Pretty please with sugar on top?” she and her fellow abortion opponents landed on this strategy.
“Environmental law has teeth. It already exists,” she stressed. “And, frankly, I’m for using the devil’s own tools against them.”
In their world, the “devil” is super concerned about clean water and responsible environmental practices, while the angels — we can only assume — are out there fracking, destroying the rainforests for palm oil and buying 100-item hauls from Shein. They have no interest in any environmental issue for which there is any evidence, and are insisting that this be considered despite the complete lack of evidence of any adverse effects of mifepristone or fetal waste getting into the drinking water supply.
“Most scientists would agree that there is no evidence that mifepristone pollution harms people, animals, or ecosystems,” Jack Vanden Heuvel, PhD, a professor of molecular toxicology at Penn state, told MedPage Today back in September.
“Overall, the likelihood of appreciable mifepristone reaching surface or recycled water is considered low compared with many other pharmaceuticals,” he added, further explaining that while people should be concerned about pharmaceuticals getting absorbed into drinking water, the focus ought to be on those we know could be harmful. Antibiotics, for instance, can contribute to antimicrobial resistance. It’s one of the reasons we’re supposed to be judicious with our consumption of antibiotics, and not take them for things like colds (which they don’t actually do anything for to begin with), so that they work when we really need them.
Speaking of antibiotics, some common ones are known to have been known to have side effects including digestive issues, rashes, headaches, fever, hallucinations and delirium. Yet, for some reason, you don’t see anyone going around demanding antibiotics be banned the way they do for mifepristone. It’s almost as if the real issue is not “side effects” (or the environment) and is, in fact, abortion. Just like they, very openly, admit that it is.
Former EPA career scientist Betsy Southerland told Politico that, if they started testing for mifepristone, on the grounds that it could hypothetically be bad, that would mean there would be less resources for testing things actually known to be toxic. Students for Life has conducted its own “testing,” and for nearly a year now has said it hopes to have its results published in a peer-reviewed journal, but that has yet to happen. The organization is also yet to say what those alleged results showed. One imagines if they found anything of value, they would have told us immediately.
Awkwardly, the campaign comes at a time when the EPA is getting ready to issue a list of 30 contaminants (none of which is mifepristone) to test drinking water for, something the agency does only once every five years. This means Students For Life would have to wait another half decade before having any shot at making its very stupid dream come true.
Hamrick said that they still may still have a chance, though, to make some changes, reporting that the EPA told her that “one path forward for us is to ask for the active metabolites in mifepristone to be added to that list, which we could do using the public comment period.” It is not clear how that would be helpful to anyone besides them, or, really, what that would do to keep us all from “drinking people’s abortions.” After all, they’re probably not going to test for “fetal tissue” or “blood.” (Though surely there is no other way that blood would end up going down the toilet.)
Hopefully, in five years, when they have another chance to add mifepristone to the list, we’ll have an EPA chief less amenable to their nonsense than Lee Zeldin, of all people, and will not have to worry about this shit.
If you use your religion as a weapon my religious tolerance goes right out the window.
"for nearly a year now has said it hopes to have its results published in a peer-reviewed journal"
I suspect they will be doing this Poodlehead/Rand Paul-style: create their own "peer-reviewed journal."
Also, funny how Kristi is not worried about Viagra and its brethren in the water. I guess boner water is okay.