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.”
SB 1976 would require wastewater facilities within 10 miles of communities with populations over 200,000 to test their water supplies for an extensive list of compounds and hormones found in birth control pills, abortion pills, gender-affirming care (testosterone and estrogen), and common pregnancy hormones. During a recent committee hearing for the bill, Hughes baselessly claimed that the “contaminants of emerging concern” include “those found in medications such as birth control pills,” causing health risks to pregnant people. That, again, simply isn’t true.
But Hughes’ particular focus on birth control is telling, Pori says. It comes amid rising attacks from Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists trying to equate different forms of birth control with abortion and appearing to target birth control outright. Since 2022, House Republicans and Senate Republicans in Congress have both sweepingly voted against bills to codify a federal right to birth control. Hughes’ language “shows where they’re [the anti-abortion movement] is going next.
If all of Hughes’ bullshit arguments sound at least vaguely familiar, that’s probably because these talking points are part of a broader campaign led by the organization Students for Life. Since at least 2022, the group has been very vocally advocating for the FDA to revoke approval of abortion pills while studying their environmental impact—which the FDA already did. “Other than abortion vendors—legal and illegal—can you name any other business in America being allowed to dump human remains and chemically tainted blood and tissue into our water without consequence?” Students for Life lied in a press release shared last week in support of SB 1976. The same release very creepily declares that “Students for Life is involved in water testing, though that should be handle [sic] by our government.” It applauds Texas for being “on the right track in getting basic information,” but eerily stresses that “what is truly needed in the state and nationwide is to stop the dumping,” effectively calling for national policing of abortion pills.
Hughes and Students for Life aren’t alone in their laughable efforts to try to ban medication abortion (and birth control, and potentially gender-affirming care) by throwing anything at the wall. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in January at his confirmation hearings that he’s open to restricting access to abortion pills thanks to faux safety concerns. Also last week, Nebraska’s legislature advanced a bill to require abortion clinics to essentially hold funerals for aborted fetuses and embryos (regardless of the patient’s wishes), because the bill claims remains from abortions are contaminating the water supply and environment. The Texas newspaper Chron notes that Montana’s legislature weighed a similar bill to Texas’s SB 1976 this session, though the bill failed to get enough votes.
“We’ve been saying this for many years: The anti-abortion movement will not stop at banning abortion,” Pori said. “It doesn’t end with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.”
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