Republicans are calling on federal authorities to impose stringent regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone, citing the dangers posed by the drug’s largely unregulated use to Americans’ drinking water. A coalition of 15 red state attorneys general is urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to add mifepristone to the agency’s Contaminant Candidate List, which would likely trigger safety studies and potentially stricter regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The latest state to join the effort was Indiana.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) said in a press release this week that the use of the abortion drug is “causing pain and suffering to women. … Obviously, this starts with the individuals persuaded by Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma to use mifepristone to abort their pregnancies, but increasingly it extends to other women who might ingest the drug from their local water supplies.” Rokita noted that when a woman ingests mifepristone, whether via the drug in pill form or via mifepristone contaminating drinking water, the chemicals block the natural production of the hormone progesterone and erodes an unborn baby’s uterine environment. “The baby, in effect, is starved to death in the womb,” the Hoosier State A.G.’s office said.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) initiated the effort petitioning the EPA to consider regulating the abortion drug. “Without a physician’s oversight, we don’t know what’s happening to the medical waste from the abortions, and, frankly, we don’t know what’s happening to the medications,” Hanaway stressed in a Thursday night “Washington Watch” interview. Noting that mifepristone is increasingly being prescribed remotely and shipped via the mail, with almost no federal safeguards, she added, “Some of these women may, after receiving it in the mail, decide not to use it and end up flushing it into the systems, in which case it’s coming in in its full concentration” into the local water supply. “The worst thing, in my mind, that could possibly happen is that a woman who is trying to have a baby drinks water in her community that’s contaminated and loses her baby as a result of the medical waste that has gone into that system.”

The drug is not only being used to commit abortions, Hanaway warned, but has also been linked to increased infertility issues, posing a risk to women who unknowingly consume the drug or traces of the drug via the local water supply. “That’s really, really tragic. I just can’t even imagine how sad you would be if you were somebody who’d been trying for a long time to have a child and got pregnant, and then an abortion was caused by your drinking water, which is a real threat here,” Hanaway asserted. “The EPA has all kinds of standards for the quality of our drinking water. To me, taking out a chemical that is literally lethal to human life should be a no-brainer,” she added. “All we’re asking them to do is take a hard look at this chemical, what the effects are, and to make sure that we aren’t causing abortions, that we aren’t having an impact that makes women less fertile,” Hanaway continued. “We really don’t know what the effects of this drug are on young girls who are just going through puberty and how they develop. We want all those questions answered.”

In March, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) introduced the Clean Water for All Life Act on Wednesday, legislation which would require an in-person doctor’s office visit for the abortion drug to be prescribed, a physician to be present for the abortion, and the provision of a “catch kit” to prevent contaminated blood and aborted tissue from entering American waterways. Abortionists who fail to adhere to the bill’s provisions would face up to five years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines. “It’s degrading human dignity and contaminating our environment,” Miller said of the abortion drug’s largely unregulated remote prescription and shipping via mail. “These do-it-yourself, at-home, chemical abortion pills are allowing women to expel the baby into the toilet, and it’s going into our wastewater.”

A report from Students for Life of America (SFLA) found that at least 50 tons of abortion-related waste is dumped into American waterways annually due to the abortion drug. SFLA described that metric as a “conservative estimate” and that the real number may be closer to 65 tons of abortion-related waste annually, including traces of mifepristone, water contaminated by mifepristone, and even aborted fetal tissue.

As early as 2025, congressional Republicans have been warning against the potentially harmful effects of mifepristone contaminating American waterways. “[M]ifepristone is a potent progesterone blocker that disrupts hormonal balance in pregnant women to induce abortion. This raises questions about the drug’s potential endocrine-disrupting effects when present in drinking water supplies,” a coalition of more than two dozen Republican legislators said in a letter last year to the EPA. “If residual amounts of the drug and its metabolites persist in wastewater, prolonged exposure could potentially interfere with a person’s fertility, regardless of sex.”