Trump Admin Wants To Test Drinking Water For Abortion, Birth Control Pills | EUROtoday

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) is demanding solutions from the Environmental Protection Agency following an excessive transfer that would hinder entry to abortion and contraception tablets.

The Trump administration’s EPA really helpful earlier this month that states start testing consuming water for sure types of abortion tablets and contraceptives — a worrisome transfer that comes after a yearslong strain marketing campaign from anti-abortion organizations weaponizing environmental rules to additional undermine entry to care.

“While you claim these benchmarks are merely to ‘empower local decision makers,’ your own statements suggest a darker reality: this is laying the groundwork for sweeping state and federal restrictions on reproductive health care,” Wyden wrote within the Monday letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

“While it is critical that the federal government work to monitor and assess the risk of pharmaceuticals in drinking water,” he continued, “the inclusion of these reproductive health medications is clearly a coordinated, politically motivated attempt to restrict women’s freedom under the guise of ‘drinking water safety.’”

The steerage for testing consuming water is a “backdoor attempt to strip access to reproductive health care,” Wyden wrote, including that it “amounts to ‘uterus surveillance.’”

Earlier this month, the EPA launched a checklist of 374 medicine that states and counties ought to monitor. The company additionally suggested native governments to create “human health benchmarks,” which might dictate how a lot of a medicine can exist in water programs earlier than it’s outlined as a contaminant. The checklist doesn’t embody mifepristone — the primary abortion capsule that has been on the middle of abortion debates — but it surely does embody misoprostol and methotrexate, two medicine used for remedy abortions and different well being points, in addition to a number of types of each day contraception tablets and the NuvaRing.

The checklist shouldn’t be meant to result in an all-out ban on any medicines, the EPA mentioned, however the company acknowledged it may pave the way in which for restrictions.

“The human health benchmarks for pharmaceuticals are not regulations and are not enforceable on their own, but they are a vital resource, empowering local decision-makers to evaluate risks and protect their communities when pharmaceutical contamination is detected at concerning levels,” the EPA mentioned in an April 2 assertion.

Trace quantities of all medicines, together with over-the-counter medicine like ibuprofen, could be present in wastewater, in line with the Guttmacher Institute, a nationwide reproductive well being analysis group. But there may be no scientific proof to again up the declare that abortion tablets or contraception are polluting consuming water or harming the atmosphere.

The EPA has traditionally launched a benchmark checklist for pesticides, however that is the primary time the division has developed a listing of pharmaceutical medicine.

The EPA opened a 60-day remark interval, throughout which the general public can ship in questions and considerations that would inform the EPA’s decision-making. Wyden argued in his letter to Zeldin that it is a bold-faced try to permit anti-abortion extremists to focus on mifepristone and get it added to the regulatory course of.

“We see exactly what your goal is with regard to the 60-day public comment period on drinking water contaminants, despite the fact that this is not formal rulemaking,” Wyden wrote. “By opening the door for extremists to flood the agency with demands to target mifepristone, the EPA is actively conspiring to do what right-wing fanatics have repeatedly failed to do in the courts, the FDA, and the halls of Congress: strip away access to the medication used in more than two thirds of abortions nationwide.”

Wyden gave the EPA till May 5 to reply with the scientific justification for together with abortion medicines and contraception tablets on its human well being benchmarks checklist.

The EPA’s resolution to incorporate sure abortion tablets and contraceptives on this checklist is without doubt one of the first actual materials wins for nationwide anti-abortion teams using environmental legal guidelines to additional prohibit abortion entry. Anti-abortion organizations have used this technique for yearsbut it surely not too long ago gained steam when Students for Life, one of many largest anti-abortion organizations within the nation, championed the problem and aligned it with the Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

Students for Life and different anti-abortion teams have gone even additional than suggesting abortion tablets presumably contaminate consuming water. Student for Life’s head of coverage Kristi Hamrick instructed Politico final 12 months that “people need to understand that they are likely drinking other people’s abortions,” claiming that remedy abortion waste, resembling placental tissue and fetal stays, could be present in consuming water.

The controversial claims are unsubstantiated and rife with anti-abortion misinformation. And but, the marketing campaign has been so profitable that House Republicans launched a invoice final month to require each pregnant individual utilizing abortion tablets to make use of rest room “catch kits” when ending a being pregnant to make sure no medical waste is flushed.

“The fact is, the abortion pill ingredients used to starve a pre-born child remain active and unfiltered in our water treatments,” Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) mentioned after introducing the Clean Water For All Life Act. “That means families across the nation may be unknowingly ingesting abortion-related chemicals in their drinking water, exposing them to potential health risks like infertility and cancer.” Although the invoice is unlikely to move, it at present has 18 co-sponsors within the House.