As Abortion Drug Spreads, Concerns Grow over Contamination of Water Supply

By: Dan Hart, originally published October 10, 2025, The Washington Stand

As the use of the mifepristone chemical abortion pill continues to rise in the U.S., concerns are growing that residue from the powerful drug as well as the remains of aborted babies are contaminating the water supply and may be contributing to fertility problems, as well as other health concerns.

Recently released  research  by Liberty Counsel Action (LCA) pointed out that when mifepristone was originally approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000, it was predicted that the impact of the drug on the environment would be minimal, and therefore “no further study was completed.” As LCA noted, since mothers who take the abortion pill are instructed to deliver their dead baby into their toilet at home, the assessment “failed to address the issue of how the fetal remains would be disposed of, essentially ignoring the reality that in many cases, said remains would enter U.S. water systems in violation of various fetal disposal and medical waste laws.”

In addition, after mifepristone is ingested by the mother, the drug is broken down by her body and eventually forms into “metabolites,” which are small biochemical molecules that are eventually excreted by the body. Although there is no current research on the possible adverse effects of these metabolites on humans and the environment, LCA pointed out that mifepristone “acts as an endocrine disruptor by blocking progesterone, a vital fertility hormone. Relatedly, infertility rates are on the rise and now affect 1 in 6 individuals. While there is a clear correlation between the increase in chemical abortions and increased rate of infertility, further study is sorely needed to establish whether there is causation.”

Lawmakers are also voicing their concerns over the water supply issue. In May 2024, 11 members of Congress including former Florida Senator (now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio (R) and Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.)  wrote a letter  to former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan pointing out that the “full impact of mifepristone has never been sufficiently studied. When the FDA approved the drug in 2000, it relied on a 1996 environmental assessment that failed to consider that human fetal remains and the drug’s active metabolites would be making their way into wastewater systems across the U.S. Any studies that have been conducted in the past should be repeated and updated to reflect the fact that the drug is far more prevalent today than it was three decades ago. In addition, the EPA should study the impact of the ‘byproducts’ of mifepristone, such as the placental tissue, fetal remains, and active metabolites that are being flushed into our nation’s wastewater system.”

On Wednesday, John Stemberger, president of LCA,  joined  “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to unpack what his organization has discovered about the issue.

“[Our research] document[s] the widespread contamination of our water from 700,000 women who are being instructed by abortion providers to deliver their babies in the toilet, which then goes [into] local city sewers [and] water plants,” he explained. “The contamination is there from not just the biohazard waste, which Students for Life estimates somewhere between 40 to 60 tons annually of waste is going into our water supply, but also mifepristone, which is not an organic drug. It doesn’t dissolve in the body like a Tylenol would. It [is a] synthetic drug, it has a half-life. So its therapeutic effect continues on after it exits the woman’s body and continues on in the water. … [There are] micro doses of mifepristone that we’re bathing in or drinking … which is not being removed at all by normal water treatment plants. … It could be affecting miscarriages, could be affecting the infertility rate, and actually there [are] just a lot of questions we don’t even know because the EPA is not studying this. The FDA is not studying [it.”

Stemberger went on to express encouragement that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign announced that the EPA would be studying pharmaceutical contamination in the water supply, but lamented how the abortion industry continues to escape scrutiny.

“[I]f a hospital was dumping biohazard waste of any type regularly as a matter of course into their toilets instead of properly disposing of it as they should, it would be a national scandal, but yet the entire abortion industry is getting away with instructing mothers to just deliver dead babies in the toilet without regard to this,” he emphasized. “The problem is, when this was all approved in the year 2000, it was a very small percentage of overall abortions, so they estimated in their very weak environmental analysis, which really wasn’t analysis at all, that it’s going to [have a] minimal impact. Well, now we’re talking about almost 70% of all abortions are these chemical abortions. So the amount of impact of both the biohazard waste … and also the mifepristone is exponentially more.”

Stemberger further observed that the FDA’s recent  approval  of a generic form of mifepristone will likely “increase the amount of biohazard waste and … the drug in the water supply.”

Stemberger concluded by urging the Trump administration to study how the abortion drug is affecting the water supply.

“They’re studying microplastics,” he noted. “The EPA can switch and study any chemical in the water. But for some reason, we know that reason. This is just a sacrosanct issue. Whenever you touch abortion, the rules are always different. So proper environmental analysis [was] not done. Oversight is not being done. … [W]e are asking [the administration] to at [a] minimum, study this. You can’t ignore it. President Trump himself, [in] five different speeches, said, ‘I want crystal clear drinking water.’ Well, you can’t have crystal clear drinking water if you have contamination from chemical abortions in the water supply.”

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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