As anti-abortion activists and politicians continue to attack access to reproductive healthcare, they’re testing a new pathway to criminalize abortion care: environmental law. In 2025 anti-abortion policymakers introduced nine bills in seven states using deceptive claims about water pollution to attack medication abortion like mifepristone.

To be clear: There’s no evidence that medication abortion is affecting U.S. water systems, including drinking water and aquatic wildlife. Meanwhile anti-abortion activists have ignored true environmental hazards to water, like pesticides, fertilizers, animal waste runoff, manufacturing waste, and industries that release untreated or partially treated wastewater into waterways.

To protect water, we need comprehensive strategies to improve water quality — not the politicization of specific medications. All medications, when excreted through the body, can leave trace amounts in wastewater — even over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and lifesaving treatments like beta blockers. 

Abortion Medication Misinformation 
Radical anti-abortion activists are scrambling to ensure people lose access to the reproductive healthcare they need and deserve. And they’re misusing environmental law to do it.

In their latest attempt to force their unpopular agenda, anti-abortion activists have published a biased and unscientific “study” claiming mifepristone — a medication used to safely end a pregnancy — is harming our water. 

The “study,” however, did not even test for mifepristone in our water system. In fact, the test they used is not capable of distinguishing between mifepristone and other progesterone-blocking substances. These substances are found in a slew of common items including sunscreen, BPA plastic, and insecticides used on crops. 

Using mis- and disinformation to claim our water system is threatened by a safe and effective abortion medication is brazenly disingenuous and steals attention from the real, known threats to water quality that should be regulated: pesticides, fertilizers, and true forever chemicals like PFAS.

The Center is tracking this issue closely and pushing back against the anti-abortion movement’s disinformation campaign while we keep fighting the real threats to our waterways. Learn more about our freshwater protection work.

For more information on how anti-abortion activists are weaponizing environmental law, read this article in Ms. Magazine: "No, Abortion Pills Aren’t Polluting U.S. Waterways."

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