The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it is launching a drinking water quality study to look for traces of abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol for the first time.
Anti-abortion activists, attorneys general, and lawmakers have been lobbying for the agency to carry the study for years.
Researchers at the agency will collect water samples “from several locations in different metropolitan areas” and test them for thousands of drugs, pesticides and synthetic chemicals, including mifepristone, misoprostol, and multiple types of “forever chemicals,” according to a description of the study.
If you read all of the article, you will see that their stated intent is to restrict access to abortion pills. This is scary because a government agency is being weaponized to lay ground work to strip rights. Neither of the hormones in those pills are on a list of environmentally damaging things.
Given that the risk is restricting rights for a whole group of people vs an unproven. Risk to the environment, the prudent thing to do is test for the KNOWN harmful chemicals and focus on mitigating them in the environment.
I would be in support of researching and if, after research, it was discovered that those drugs are harmful, testing for and addressing them.
Tl;Dr There are big fish to fry in terms of environmentally damaging chemicals. Frying something that might not even be a fish, at the price of government intervention in a whole group of people, and, honestly, generation of children, is a terrible violation of privacy, and rights.
I might have missed it but the article seemed to state two things separately, that the epa is gonna test for a bunch of stuff and some birth control compounds are included in that group and that an anti abortion group has been pushing for that for quite some time.
Im old, so the claim that the pill gets in the water isn’t new to me. A government entity actually testing to see if it’s true is. I don’t think it’s bad to do this study.
I think saying “no, you shouldn’t even test for it!” Does more harm to women than otherwise.