Anti-Abortion Activists Are Now Trying to Weaponize Environmental Regulations

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Now that they’re afraid of putting abortion on the ballot, anti-abortion groups are trying out a new strategy: They want to weaponize environmental regulations, like waste water restrictions, to limit at-home medication abortion, which has become the most common method of abortion in America.

Students for Life of America announced Wednesday that they have filed a citizens’ petition with the Food and Drug Administration to require abortion providers to dispose of any tissue a person produces after taking the pills. The group told Politico, which first reported on the new strategy, that it plans to sue if the FDA rejects or ignores its plea. Kristi Hamrick, the chief policy strategist of Students for Life, said the move is “the next innovation” in restricting abortion.

The group claims that at-home abortion with pills is an environmental hazard, because people flush fetal tissue down the toilet and traces of the pills could somehow make it into groundwater. If that sounds awful, remember that abortion pills are recommended through 12 weeks of pregnancy; an actual early stage pregnancy looks like a clump or clot that’s normally passed during menstruation; and miscarriages that people often mistake for a heavy period are flushed every day.

Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director of the Center for Biological Diversity, derided the anti-abortion group’s strategy. “Pharmaceutical contamination of water is a serious issue that can have serious impacts on the environment but trying to say that one drug out of thousands is having an outsized effect is based on ideology not evidence,” Donley told Politico. “Of all the drugs and synthetic chemicals we shed that can potentially contaminate water, abortifacients are a fraction of a fraction of a percent. It’s nothing.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/anti-abortion-activists-now-trying-190300447.html

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[gratuitous]

2. "Based on ideology not evidence"

Uh, that's been the anti-abortion strategy for decades. The fetal heartbeat bills? Absolutely built on ideology, not evidence, that somehow finds a heart in a fetus at six weeks. This nonsense has to be taken seriously, because the people backing it are serious about reducing women to one organ that the law will be written to say does not belong to them.

[Maraya1969]

3. This sounds insane. Nathan Donley is right - the amount of drugs that end up down the toilet

is a LOT and they want to stop ONE PILL that women take for a few days because those pills are dangerous for the environment.

So disingenuous of them

[NickB79]

4. Imagine all the birth control hormones literally pissed away daily

If abortion pills are an environmental danger, then SURELY we should ban birth control pills too, right?

[Blaukraut]

5. Banning contraceptives is also on their to do list

So you're not that far off.

[drmeow]

6. Works for Viagra, too

WAY more common than abortifacients.