After GOP Pressure, EPA Says It Could Test Wastewater for Abortion Meds

A New York Times report reveals that dozens of Republican lawmakers want to see how badly they can misuse the agency's capabilities.

By Danielle Han | October 14, 2025 | 1:45pm

Photo: Getty Abortion

After GOP Pressure, EPA Says It Could Test Wastewater for Abortion Meds

When Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes introduced a bill that would require wastewater plants to test for traces of abortion pills last April, a state legislative counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights warned Jezebel it could “lay the groundwork to ban [the medication] nationwide.” Fortunately, S.B. 1976 never became law. But over the summer, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency told the Trump administration that it could be possible to test wastewater for abortion medication.

According to the New York Times, 25 GOP legislators sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in June, saying “the American people deserve to know what contaminants might be present in their drinking water and their potential impacts on public health.” The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.)—who once called abortion “murder” and celebrated the overturning of Roe. It went on to ask: “Are there existing EPA-approved methods for detecting mifepristone and its active metabolites in water supplies?”

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Not yet. Speaking to the Times, two sources familiar with the events said that EPA scientists couldn’t find any existing methods to do such testing, but suggested new ones could be developed.

The EPA has monitored wastewater in the past but to test for disease, or to ensure cleanliness standards. (During the covid pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relied on the National Wastewater Surveillance System to collect data on outbreaks across the nation.) But without proper regulation, scientists and legal experts have been worried that wastewater-based epidemiology could lead to unnecessary harms—such as, say, anti-abortion politicians using it to surveil abortion seekers.

“This is about politicized government surveillance, not science,” Liz Wagner, a senior federal policy counsel at CFRR told Jezebel in a statement. “Using environmental monitoring as a cover to police abortion access would be the height of hypocrisy. Anti-abortion extremists and lawmakers who ignore real threats to public health want to misuse these tools to target safe essential medications like mifepristone. The government should be protecting our rights, not trying to spy on our personal health choices.” (Mifepristone, the first of two pills taken in a medication abortion, accounts for nearly two-thirds of abortions done in the United States.)

According to the Times report, several former officials who worked on water quality and chemical detection issues were queasy about this new potential surveillance effort, and a former head of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development told the paper she worried that the government “could isolate it to an apartment building or a school or a public building. Could they go so far as to isolate it from an individual house? It’s unclear if that’s legal.”

“It’s terrifying to see this administration abandon public health, but it’s outright Orwellian to aim these tools against abortion,” Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Jezebel. “This is just one of the ways that surveillance technologies are being turned against abortion seekers in post-Dobbs America.”

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