GOP Lawmakers Are Using a Wild Conspiracy Theory to Attack Medication Abortion

Posted November 20, 2025

Anti-abortion activists have been trying to convince the broader public that medication abortion is dangerous for years, but their latest argument is a decades-old asinine conspiracy theory. In a June 18 letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, 25 House Republicans asked the agency to study the alleged “byproducts” of Mifepristone (the first medication administered in a medication abortion regimen) in water systems. In the letter, the Republican legislators make an unfounded assertion that “residual amounts of the drug and its metabolites” in wastewater “could potentially interfere with a person’s fertility, regardless of sex.” The anti-abortion lawmakers wanted clarification on whether the agency has methods for detecting the medication and its “byproducts” in water supplies and, if not, what resources are needed to develop such methods.

To be clear: Anti-abortion politicians want to spend government funds to investigate the claim that abortions are floating around in your drinking water.

If this preposterous claim weren’t unsettling enough, former EPA officials told The New York Times that the EPA had already developed “general technology … [that] could be used for surveillance in states where abortion is illegal.” The surveillance technology could be used to isolate the source to “a particular street or home where the pills were used, though such measures would be legally fraught and extremely costly.”

In an era when cops are using license plate readers to track people traveling for abortion care, and social media companies like Facebook are handing over private messages between a mother and daughter seeking an abortion to police leading to their incarceration, this is another alarming development.

The anti-abortion movement has been injecting this deliberate disinformation into mainstream politics for years — including this exact myth of abortion pills poisoning our water, which we detail in our book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.

I (Renee) first encountered this myth in 2015 when I visited a Maryland anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center as part of an investigation into tactics used by the center’s volunteers to coerce people out of an abortion. While I sat at the table waiting for them to notify me of the positive pregnancy test, they claimed that not only was abortion dangerous to my fertility, but that the remnants of abortion medication and fetal remains were in the very water we all drank. This seemingly small conspiracy theory designed to convince unknowing people out of their decision to have an abortion is now shaping federal policy, with the intention to surveil millions.

Abortion disinformation has spread wildly since that encounter at the crisis pregnancy center a decade ago, as fringe anti-abortion groups circulate it online. In a 2023 TikTok video, Students for Life claimed that the government hasn’t investigated the prevalence of abortion pills in our nation’s wastewater system in two decades, coincidentally the same amount of time since abortion pills were first approved for prescription by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The organization claims that people using medication abortion are flushing human bodies down the toilet and destroying the environment, and that this warrants investigation by the FDA. (We should note that the Environmental Protection Agency is the agency that oversees the safety of drinking water, not the FDA.)

When we detail this example during book tour stops, it elicits giggles, shock, and the assumption that we’re joking. We wish this were just a laugh line, but it’s not. The right’s focus on traces of abortion medication in wastewater is another example of the anti-abortion movement’s most radical and anti-science ideas inevitably leading to the criminalization of pregnant people. Anti-abortion activists have led campaigns to smear medication abortion through the spread of disinformation, misleading data about its safety, or by calling it “chemical abortion” in order to instill fear and confusion through this misnomer.

Their “abortionsplaining” efforts — what we call their abortion disinformation tactics — have redoubled in the years following the height of the COVID pandemic, when medication abortion use increased due to social distancing regulations and our health care system’s shift toward telehealth. Medication abortion is now the most common method of abortion in the United States; it allows people to receive abortions in their communities, potentially evading state surveillance.

Over the years, we have seen our fair share of absurd anti-abortion assertions, such as lawmakers claiming that abortions cause tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts — even a congressional witness testimony claiming abortions power the electrical grid in Washington, D.C. went unquestioned by members of Congress. Each time, people are shocked that something so ludicrous would be spread by fringe activists, becoming offhand remarks by politicians, and soon after the basis for anti-abortion regulations.

Under this second Trump administration, however, this rhetoric, alongside a long-term coordinated disinformation campaign, is being weaponized by congressional lawmakers who seem eager to expand their dragnet for arresting and prosecuting already over-policed communities. According to Pregnancy Justice, more than 400 people were prosecuted with pregnancy-related crimes in the first two years since the Dobbs decision allowed states to re-criminalize abortion. That’s in addition to over 60 people who were criminalized between 2000 and 2020, while Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, according an If When How report.

The number of cases is rising due to the expansion of so-called “fetal personhood,” an effort by anti-abortion legislators to give an embryo or fetus legal rights that often supersede the rights of a pregnant person. It is within this “fetal personhood” framework that we should view the wastewater surveillance tactic — particularly the way criminal charges might be applied. Reproductive justice legal scholars like Dorothy Roberts and Michele Bratcher Goodwin have documented cases of low-income women (often women of color) who have been incarcerated and had their parental rights severed by the state because they refused medical interventions, tested positive for various substances (including safe and legal foods and medications) during their pregnancies, or experienced violence during pregnancy. Fetal endangerment laws are rarely applied to address harm that befalls a pregnant person, rather they are used to criminalize pregnant people, pitting their autonomy against the embryos and fetuses they carry.

The anti-abortion lawmakers have always promoted their claims of fetal endangerment under the guise of protecting the fetus. Similarly, restrictions on medication abortion are pushed under the pretense of protecting fertility concerns, but those so-called concerns have historically expanded surveillance and generally translate to prosecution and incarceration of Black and Brown pregnant people.

The claims to protect life were always a farce, especially for immigrants and communities of color. With our own eyes we are witnessing how violent our government is when it comes to destroying families, with little to no regard for pregnant people and their children.

It may have felt easy to dismiss outlandish claims about abortion as radical right-wing conspiracy theories, but our government is now run by fanatics. The House Republicans’ letter indicates they are not above combing through the sewers like Pennywise in search of microscopic evidence of our abortions. The fall of Roe gave them the opportunity to fuse anti-abortion policies with surveillance and criminalization efforts.

Combined with our nation’s ever-growing military, digital, and physical surveillance apparatus, the right to privacy is a mere pipe dream. But the right’s pro-natalist fascist project is dependent on us complying — snitching on loved ones, turning over private communications, and allowing white supremacy to guide our thoughts about whose pregnancies deserve punishment.

Our only hope is to keep organizing against government intrusion and to call for the decriminalization of pregnancy before it’s too late. It will take all of us, recognizing the seriousness of their seemingly silly threats, to protect our lives.

Renee Bracey Sherman is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions. Regina Mahone is a writer and editor whose work explores the intersections between race, class, and reproductive rights. She currently serves as a senior editor at The Nation magazine.

This commentary is republished from Truthout under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).