Top Anti-Abortion Group Previews Brazen Junk Science Plot to Restrict Abortion Pills

Students for Life wants to target abortion pills with meaningless wastewater studies and its president compared herself to Erin Brockovich.

Top Anti-Abortion Group Previews Brazen Junk Science Plot to Restrict Abortion Pills
Photo by danilo.alvesd / Unsplash

I can't stop thinking about a story that Politico published last week about a group of activists using a "desperate," unscientific tactic to target medication abortion, while comparing themselves to environmental crusaders.

Some backstory: The prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life has been advocating since 2022 for states and the federal government to use environmental laws to restrict access to abortion pills. The group makes a tortured argument that the increase in people having abortions at home with the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol means more people are flushing their expelled pregnancy tissue down the toilet—and that trace amounts of mifepristone are contaminating the water supply, including drinking water.

Students for Life wants to require healthcare providers who prescribe abortion pills to make their patients collect the fetal remains in a medical waste “catch kit” and return them to the provider for disposal. The clinic or medical practice could be hundreds of miles away, and doctors can't actually force their patients to come back, so policies like this could lead providers to stop prescribing the pills altogether. It would be banning the pills without actually banning them.

On Thursday, Politico reported that five states have introduced legislation to this effect—Arizona, Idaho, Maine, West Virginia, and Wyoming—and Students for Life is gloating about how they're preparing lawsuits and junk science to cite in those cases.

The organization said it had conducted its own testing in three U.S. cities, which reportedly found evidence of mifepristone in the water supply and they hope to publish this research in a peer-reviewed journal sometime in 2025.

But, crucially, Zac Kester, an attorney advising Students for Life, admitted to Politico that the testing doesn't show that trace amounts of mifepristone are harming humans or animals. Nevertheless, Politico reports, "the group hopes to cite the finding in lawsuits against individual doctors, drugmakers Danco and GenBioPro, and the Food and Drug Administration." In other words, they're going claim in federal court that the very existence of mifepristone in water means the drug should be restricted. And if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed as Health Secretary, he might go for this crackpot argument. (Kennedy said during his confirmation hearings that Donald Trump asked him "to study the safety of mifepristone.”)

Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins then compared herself to the famous activist who helped win settlements for people who got cancer from contaminated groundwater. “There’s the potential for hundreds of billions of dollars in damages if I ‘Erin Brockovich’ this case, and I have some lawyers who are very excited by that possibility,” Hawkins told Politico.

Actually, there's very little chance that mifepristone is harming anyone via the water supply, as experts told Politico. Molecularly, mifepristone is more likely to stick to solid waste, and water treatment plants separate solid waste from liquids meaning it's highly unlikely that trace amounts would reach rivers or streams, let alone tap water. “Most wastewater treatment plants are very effective at getting rid of any mifepristone that is there,” Penn State toxicologist Jack Vanden Heuvel said. He added that restricting mifepristone for this reason is “a pretty desperate argument.” Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health professor at the University of California San Francisco, was more direct. “All kinds of pharmaceuticals are in the drinking water supply, so the fact that this group is making this argument is not actually about drinking water,” she said. “They are doing this to control women’s bodies.”

And it wouldn't be the first time anti-abortion groups tried to use junk science to restrict people's access to healthcare! There's the longstanding claims that abortion is linked to cancer, or that fetuses can feel pain before viability, either at 20 weeks or 15 weeks, both of which are complete crap. More recently, two studies cited in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case against the FDA were retracted because of undeclared conflicts of interest and unreliable findings. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk even cited one of them in his ruling in which he attempted to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone.

This tactic of weaponizing pseudoscience isn't new, but Students for Life is sure being brazen about it. Consider yourself warned.


Also:

  • I wrote for The New Republic about a recent study that suggests an emergency contraception ingredient could sub in for mifepristone in medication abortions—and how this and other research shows that the real "abortion pill" is misoprostol.
  • And for Jezebel, I wrote about the unsettling resolution out of Idaho calling on the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 marriage equality ruling.
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