EPA Wants to Know If Abortion-Pill Compounds Are in Your Drinking Water

For the first time, the federal government is moving to test drinking water for traces of abortion drugs. The EPA is adding mifepristone and misoprostol to a new screening project that will test water samples alongside more than 1,000 other pharmaceuticals, PFAS, and other chemicals, the result of years of pressure from anti-abortion advocates, attorneys general, and members of Congress. 

EPA says the September project will use non-targeted analysis, which lets researchers check each water sample against a library of more than 1,400 chemicals. More than 250 are pharmaceuticals. The list also includes pesticides and PFAS. Mifepristone, misoprostol, misoprostol acid and several mifepristone metabolites appear by name.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the study Sept. 9 and said Americans had raised concerns about unknown pollutants in drinking water.

“The Trump EPA is committed to getting to the bottom of this, so that Americans can feel confident about the safety of their drinking water.”

EPA has not named the participating water systems. The agency says it is working with the water sector to select systems in several metropolitan areas, with testing expected to take place over the next year. 

Students for Life of America has led the push, spending years lobbying EPA to test drinking water for abortion-drug compounds. Nineteen members of Congress and 14 state attorneys general filed comments to the EPA echoing the group's call. SFLA called the new federal testing a "victory for common sense." 

"You don't have to be pro-life to want crystal-clear drinking water," SFLA President Kristan Hawkins said.

Students for Life has also pointed to research published in July in Issues in Law & Medicine. Researchers took samples in Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Carbondale, Illinois. Researchers tested them for anti-progesterone activity and reported activity in most of the sample categories they examined. 

The July paper did not chemically identify mifepristone in the samples. Researchers used the PR CALUX assay to measure anti-progesterone activity and benchmarked the results against mifepristone, or RU486. The authors said further testing is needed to determine whether the samples contain mifepristone or another compound with anti-progesterone activity. 

EPA’s new test uses a different approach. Its mass-spectrometry-based system compares substances detected in drinking water against reference profiles for known chemicals, including mifepristone and misoprostol. EPA’s first pass will answer a presence-or-absence question. The non-targeted analysis does not measure how much of a detected chemical is in the water. 

Even if EPA finds one of the compounds, that alone would not show that the water is dangerous. It also would not automatically put mifepristone or misoprostol under a federal drinking-water limit. EPA says the screening is meant to tell scientists which compounds deserve a closer look. 

RedState has previously covered separate fights over mifepristone involving FDA rules, telehealth prescriptions and pills sent through the mail.

SFLA is already looking past the one-year study. It wants EPA to make testing for abortion-drug compounds a permanent part of drinking-water monitoring.

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