Environmental Impact

With more than half of America’s abortions now committed with chemical abortion pills, sending human remains, tissue, and potent chemicals into the wastewater system, we have to ask a critical question: what’s happening to the environment? It’s time to call on the FDA to investigate and hold the line on chemical abortion pill regulation to protect people and the planet.

Already, the federal government has removed REMs (risk evaluation and mitigation strategies) for abortion drugs, making them easier than ever to sell en masse. And during the coronavirus crisis, the abortion industry finally came out of the shadows with what will be the future of their industry for early abortion — the sale and distribution of chemical abortion pills resulting in increasing amounts of aborted infants flushed into America’s waste water systems. For those tasked with keeping our water safe, human remains are called “pathological waste,” which the EPA recommends being carefully treated by incineration or other special handling.

READ: Background
READ: Harvard Essay

Pharmaceuticals move throughout the aquatic environment

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Credit: Al Granberg
The Scientist

No Regard for Women or Planet

This raises relatively new and unaddressed issues for those pushing chemical abortion pills on a global scale. Their goal is a fast sale, without any testing that might preserve a woman’s life or ability to have future children, and with the expectation that she experiences a horrific bleeding event in a bathroom away from their offices, flushing away the body of an aborted infant along with the placenta, which can carry infection.

When it comes to pathological waste the “medical waste generator,” the one who is in charge of the process that created the waste, is responsible for the handling of the human remains. For example, a person whose limb is amputated isn’t given the job of disposing of it. That task stays with the medical professionals whose actions lead to the pathological waste. Why is that not the case with the abortion industry?

READ: The Dangers
More on Medical Waste Bags

The FDA Must Act

Students for Life of America has reached out to the FDA asking the agency to require a new environmental assessment. After all, during the approval process for RU-486, an environmental impact study for the drugs focused on the impact of packaging for the drugs, rather than on the impact of human remains in our waste water system and ground water.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 50 percent of abortions are committed with chemical abortion drugs, a number that can’t be verified as no National Abortion Reporting Law exists, and some states such as California report no data at all. Add to that the number of chemical abortion pills sold in the U.S. illegally through websites that the FDA has ordered to close and it’s clear that the human remains of hundreds of thousands are in America’s waste water.

READ: The Abortion Exception
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