Bizarre Texas Bill Wants to Test the Water for Birth Control, Abortion Pills
To suggest these medications are present in our water supply, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns, is to “lay the groundwork to ban them nationwide.”
Photo: Getty Images AbortionPolitics
So far this legislative session, Texas has tried to charge abortion patients with homicide and ban internet providers from hosting online information about abortion access. Still, state Republicans continue to top themselves. Last week, state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R) introduced SB 1976, a bill that would require wastewater treatment plants to test for abortion pills and hormones commonly found in birth control, as well as testosterone and estrogen, claiming all of these pose a threat to pregnant people and children.
Except… just a couple (obviously) huge flags here, Bella Pori, state legislative counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Jezebel. First, Pori cited the FDA’s initial environmental impact report for mifepristone, one of the two most common abortion pills, published just a few years before the agency formally approved the medication in 2000. Per the FDA, mifepristone’s projected environmental concentration from use is less than 1 part per billion (ppb)—which is to say, mifepristone isn’t causing any pollution whatsoever. And, second, Pori says, Texas’s bill isn’t about environmental concerns at all. “It’s really just the latest in a long line of efforts by the anti-abortion movement to trick and backdoor their way into banning access to mifepristone and other abortion medications.” Anti-abortion activists have filed lawsuits and pushed for outright bans on medication abortion, but because those efforts have thus far failed, now “they’re trying this last-ditch, environmental effort based on pseudoscience through SB 1976.” To suggest these medications are present in our water supply, Pori said, is to “lay the groundwork to ban them nationwide.”