OPINION:
The need for safe drinking water impacts everyone, which in the United States led to the creation of governmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tasked with protecting both planet Earth and those who live here.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the EPA has aggressively worked with states to ensure our nation’s waterways are protected and kept safe, advising that all kinds of materials be kept from our waste water system for maximum safety and offering guidelines for what not to put into a toilet.
But in this time of the coronavirus crisis, the abortion industry has come 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.
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, including COVID-19.
But handling this situation alone should not be the burden of hurting women. In fact, technically, it isn’t.
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?
Students for Life of America recently reached out to the FDA asking the agency to require a new environmental assessment, especially at this time in which the abortion industry along with political allies including 21 state attorneys general, the ACLU and even a former FDA commissioner are calling for a change in how chemical abortion pills, also known as RU-486, are distributed and regulated.
At the very least, before such getting rid of health and safety standards put in place to protect women from death and injury from RU-486, the impact of the drugs on women and the environment should be re-examined given their known dangers.
We noted that “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 … As the American Academy of Family Physicians observes, ‘Home based health care can create medical waste which can be hazardous if not disposed properly.’”
As chemical abortion was fast walked by the Clinton administration into America, the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee accepted an environmental assessment from the Population Council, the abortion advocacy organization trying to get the chemicals approved for sale with estimates of extraordinary profits, asserting that “adverse effects” were not anticipated.
They certainly were not closely examined in 1996 as abortion advocates, closeted with abortion-friendly personnel engaged in secretive meetings that “could have been mistaken for an unveiling of CIA secrets,” notes a Harvard report on the process.
Even if you give the abortion advocates who spent years trying to bring RU-486 to the states through multiple channels the benefit of the doubt, times have changed.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that almost 40 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. In an environment polluted by the chemical abortion drugs, animals’ pregnancies can also be ended as mifepristone and misoprostol both harm non-human innocent life as well.
For several years, Students for Life raised environmental concerns with the California legislature multiple times as state legislators pushed forward a law over the objections of the department of finance, which now requires state colleges and universities to distribute deadly chemical abortion pills on campuses. Massachusetts and New York have bills attempting to do the same.
The EPA and state attorneys general have the authority to fight for the safety of our water and determine whether pathological waste is impacting the availability of clean water. And the FDA is well within its rights to re-examine the issue as the “National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) requires all federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of their actions.”
Before chemical abortion drugs are basically deregulated, allowing for dangerous distribution of pills known to harm women and end preborn life, officials at all levels should exercise their authority to protect the environment and the people who depend on them for clean water by examining the impact of human remains in our nation’s water systems.
• Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.
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