Marco Rubio Pretending To Believe There's Abortion Drugs And Baby Legs In Your Tap Water
Uh oh, Marco Rubio went and made Robyn MAD ABOUT A THING.
One thing you can say about the anti-abortion rights crowd is that they are very creative. Another thing you can say is that they are not afraid of hypocrisy. This week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), along with US Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) and several of their Republican colleagues who also have no history of caring about the environment, issued a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan demanding a study on the effect of Mifepristone and fetal remains on the environment, specifically our water systems. Because they are apparently worried that tiny baby legs are getting caught in their Brita filters, I guess.
It’s especially rich, given that in May of last year, Rubio cheered the Supreme Court’s decision to block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from protecting our wetlands from pollution.
This isn’t the first time anyone’s tried this act. Students for Life started it back in 2022, and soon after, West Virginia state Sen. Patricia Rucker’s (R) “Chemical Abortion Prohibition Act” included ridiculous faux-environmental restrictions like requiring chemical abortion patients to be given a “catch kit and medical waste bag” so they can return the miscarriage waste to back to the abortion provider.
It is, however, the first time it’s been tried on a national level, so let’s take a look at that letter:
Dear Administrator Regan:
We write with regard to the chemical abortion drug mifepristone and its potential negative environmental impact, including its effect on water systems in the United States. Given the steadily increasing rate of at-home chemical abortions, it is vital that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ensure mifepristone, the drug’s active metabolites in blood and placenta tissue, and the fetal remains of unborn children — all of which are unbelievably being flushed into America’s wastewater system — do not pose a threat to the health and safety of humans and wildlife.
A few things here!
Between 10 and 26 percent of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, not counting those that happen before someone knows they are pregnant. They have been flushed down toilets since the first toilets flushed.
Also, there is literally no reason to believe that mifepristone in waste water is any more of a danger than any of the many, many other pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs people take, including those that they take far more often than anyone takes mifepristone.
Via Politifact:
The EPA said it measured around 100 pharmaceuticals and calculated the predicted environmental maximum concentrations for all approved prescriptions. Even the most prescribed medications are used by less than 10% of the population, the agency said, and only a fraction of a dose is excreted in someone’s urine.
"There is a very large dilution factor, considering the volume of all the water in a community wastewater system," the agency said. "That wastewater is treated before discharge into surface and other receiving waters, where further dilution occurs. Those surface and other source waters are further treated before becoming drinking water."
To put these concentrations into perspective, depending on the drug, it would take months to decades of drinking two liters of raw, untreated wastewater per day to expose a person to a single dose, the EPA said.
And no one wants to do that! I drink slightly over two liters of clean, treated, filtered water a day and even that is probably too much for most people.
Rubio and friends also suggested that the EPA has been deficient when it comes to studying the drug’s impact:
The full impact of mifepristone has never been sufficiently studied. When the FDA approved the drug in 2000, it relied on a 1996 environmental assessment that failed to consider that human fetal remains and the drug’s active metabolites would be making their way into wastewater systems across the U.S. Any studies that have been conducted in the past should be repeated and updated to reflect the fact that the drug is far more prevalent today than it was three decades ago. In addition, the EPA should study the impact of the “byproducts” of mifepristone, such as the placental tissue, fetal remains, and active metabolites that are being flushed into our nation’s wastewater system.
OK, so, just to be clear, when pharmaceuticals are tested, their impact on wastewater is not, for the reasons just cited above. The drug is also not much more prevalent than any other drug. Certainly not more prevalent in Florida than meth, and yet a search of “Marco Rubio Methgator” turns up absolutely nothing.
This is not to say that pharmaceuticals in our water are not a problem, but they’re a lot more of a problem when they are just dumped directly in the toilet instead of going through the human body.
At the end of the letter, Rubio asks some questions that we are more than happy to answer for him.
Given the dramatic increase in mifepristone use, how does the EPA plan to ensure the safety of our waterways and drinking water?
The same way it does all of the time. An increase in mifepristone use does not present any kind of danger to the environment or our drinking water — especially considering it is generally only taken once.
To what extent has the EPA studied the impact of mifepristone on water systems across the U.S.?
Environmental engineers regularly test America’s water supply and these tests that they use can pick up the mifepristone compound. Those who do this say that they have not found any.
If the EPA has conducted such studies, when did they take place, and have they been updated in light of the increased prevalence of chemical abortions?
Literally all of the time, you fucking dumbass.
What are the negative health effects for humans associated with exposure to mifepristone and fetal remains in drinking water?
There’s no mifepristone or fetal remains in your drinking water. That is fucking insane.
How are aquatic species affected by exposure to mifepristone and fetal remains in our waterways?
Again, those who have studied and tested our water have not found any damn mifepristone in it. Also, again, people miscarrying into water is nothing new or even something that only began happening with the advent of mifepristone. It has been happening all along. This is the least of all issues that these animals face, environmentally.
It feels stupid even answering these questions, because of course they already know they answer, they just think they’re being cute and tricking people. These people will look for any opening they have to stigmatize abortion and decrease the ability of people to get abortions.
What I’d love to know is what they expect to happen here? Do they think that the EPA is going to do a study on mifepristone alone, determine that it’s too dangerous to the water to prescribe to people? If that is the case, then they’re probably going to have to do the same thing to drugs that have been found to be far more concentrated in wastewater, even if they are no longer present in actual drinking water. That should be fun, no?
But that’s not what they want. What they want is for the EPA to take the abortion pills away from the whores entirely, under the guise of protecting drinking water and aquatic animals, which is almost definitely not going to happen while anyone remotely competent is there.
PREVIOUSLY:
Dear Marco,
Since you're all het up about removing supposed impurities from the nation's drinking water, I'd like to invite you down here to the stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where literally hundreds of refineries and chemical plants are dumping tons of carcinogen and toxic effluent into our drinking water. But for some reason, you and your GOP chumps are too busy fellating the oil and gas industry to give two flat fucks about cleaning up "Cancer Alley."
Fuck you and your South Beach poolboy boyfriend.
No love,
EQ
again with the baby parts when we all know that the genuine ones are sold at ebaby.