Anti-Abortion Effort Pushes States for Wastewater Restrictions

State battles over reproductive rights are turning toward environmental law as legislatures and advocates grapple over whether abortions pose a threat to community water supplies.

Anti-abortion policy figures say abortion pills contaminate water supplies and want state governments to take action. For several years, they’ve pursued “clean water bills” across state legislatures, a tactic that has yet to result in an actual law but that shows no signs of slowing.

“There’s a huge body of law out there that’s been untapped in terms of addressing this issue,” said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for Students for Life.

Through legislation, lawmakers and activists have called on states to test water for traces of abortion medication, force women to use kits to collect remains from abortion and return them as medical waste, and hold drugmakers liable for contamination.

Hamrick’s group announced nearly 50 days of lobbying state legislatures, during which clean water and medication abortion access has been “front and center.”

“The abortion industry has set up a situation in which they are not following the laws that others follow, and in which they have a business which will generate pathological medical waste by definition,” Hamrick said. State lawmakers “are very interested in these conversations and in this legislation.”

Those pushing for greater reproductive care see “wastewater bills” as a means to limit access to abortion pills, specifically mifepristone. Abortion advocates say the effort is an attempt to distort environmental law to increase community surveillance and convince people that abortion is not just an individual choice, but one that harms the greater community.

“The purpose is for anti-choice activists to create this paper trail that works against the proven credibility of mifepristone, so that they can more easily challenge the safety of abortion medication in the future,” including on the national level, said Lexi White, director of state strategies at All* Above All.

With wastewater bills in 2026, “we’re already seeing more than previous years,” White said.

Legislative Framing

Legislators and activists are relying on a variety of federal environmental laws to frame their efforts, according to Kelley Dennings, a Center for Biological Diversity campaigner.

In the case of abortion-related remains allegedly in surface water, the Clean Water Act comes into play, Dennings said. With drinking water, efforts lean on the Safe Drinking Water Act, she said, while the and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act has been leveraged for medical waste or manufacturer liability.

One example is Pennsylvania’s HB1845, which “utilizes all three tactics.”

Similarly, Students for Life has pointed to the National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Water Act in citizens petitions to the FDA.

While “there’s plenty of concern” for water cleanliness, abortion medication “should not jump to the top of the line,” Dennings said. “We want these laws to be strong and useful for things that we know are already a concern that are not being regulated.”

Wisconsin’s AB718 and its Senate counterpart would require the drug company behind an abortion medication to cover water mitigation should chemicals enter the supply. They also require physicians prescribing abortion pills to provide the patient with a “catch kit” and medical waste bag.

In South Carolina, HB4655 calls for testing wastewater to check for medication abortion metabolites. Sarita Edgerton, the South Carolina state representative behind the bill, said she’d gone to a summer conference where they’d discussed studies in college towns where mifepristone traces were found in waste water.

Long Game

Critics say legislation opens the door for surveilling women for using abortion pills and spreading misinformation.

Wastewater bills “serve the echo chamber of people’s confusion,” said Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the Guttmacher Institute.

A Guttmacher report chronicles nine bills introduced across seven states in 2025. A Texas bill called for quarterly testing of wastewater treatment plants for mifepristone traces.

A Wyoming bill called for testing public water for medication abortion byproducts. The water quality administrator for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, however, said her group lacked toxicologists for testing and the US Environmental Protection Agency lacked an established approach for testing.

“The strategy we’ve seen from anti abortion advocates and legislators is to introduce these bills over and over again to push disinformation and attempt to normalize these attacks on abortion access,” said Tristan Sullivan-Wilson, senior policy counsel at Planned Parenthood.

“The point of these bills is to make it even harder for people seeking abortion care and to shift public perception of medication abortion to something that’s unsafe for individuals and communities, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” Sullivan-Wilson said.

Planned Parenthood has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.

Federal Push

Efforts to tie mifepristone to environmental efforts also reach the federal level.

In June 2025, US lawmakers wrote to the EPA over “concerns regarding mifepristone and its potential contaminant effects on our nation’s waters.”

Hamrick also said her group is calling on the EPA to conduct water testing for remnants of abortions or related medications.

That comes as the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Health and Human Services announced plans for their own safety assessment of mifepristone.

All* Above All’s White said state bills are “part of a coordinated strategy” to “establish a state sanctioned culture of fear, particularly for folks who may be self-managing in states that have really restrictive policies, or even for providers who are administering medication abortion across state lines in states where there are restrictive bans in place.”

“We can’t paint any of these threats as unlikely to garner momentum,” White said. “I don’t think that it would be wise to to think that they will disappear on their own.”