A group of Republican lawmakers from the House and Senate are asking Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to add a chemical abortion drug to the list of contaminants in public water systems.
Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, and Rep. Josh Brecheen and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma led 16 GOP lawmakers in sending a letter to Mr. Zeldin urging the addition of mifepristone to the agency’s sixth Contaminant Candidate List (CCL 6), which identifies contaminants in public water systems that are not currently subject to regulation.
The Republican lawmakers underscored the dangerous, adverse effects of mifepristone on women—impacting nearly 11% of women — and said there is a well-founded concern that mifepristone may be contaminating public water systems and posing serious environmental and public health threats.
“In addition to killing unborn babies and threatening the well-being or lives of their mothers, Mifepristone has the potential to impact our national water system, a danger that was acknowledged by the Food and Drug Administration thirty years ago,” the lawmakers wrote.
“In 1996, the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) claimed that adverse environmental effects from mifepristone were ‘not anticipated,’ but acknowledged that ‘[m]ifepristone may enter the environment from excretion by patients, from disposal of pharmaceutical waste, or from emissions from manufacturing sites,’” they wrote.
They argue the drug poses serious risks to women, stating that “more than one out of ten (10.93%) women who take this dangerous pill experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging or another serious adverse event within 45 days.
“As the use of mifepristone has risen, its impact on drinking water should be closely researched and monitored,” the lawmakers asserted.
The Republicans asked the EPA to add mifepristone to CCL 6 to “determine whether the active metabolites that enter our Nation’s water system through mifepristone abortions threaten access to our safe drinking water” and study “whether the level of mifepristone present in the Nation’s water system is significant enough to cause endocrine disruption.”
The letter comes at a time when the FDA is moving forward on a safety study of mifepristone that will be an analysis of hundreds of thousands of cases, with interim results potentially released in July.
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