The Clean Water for All Life Act, introduced last week by Illinois Republican Rep. Mary Miller, sounds like an environmental law. Its sponsors would like you to believe their goal is to protect our drinking water from contaminants. But the new bill is really just a thinly veiled attack on medication abortion.
If passed, the law would put bizarre restrictions on medication abortion under the guise of addressing “environmental contamination” associated with “abortion-related medical waste.”
Medication abortions would have to be completed in the “physical presence of a health-care provider,” according to a statement from Miller. (It’s unclear whether this means that the prescription would have to be written in-person, or whether the medication would need to be taken with the provider watching.)
The legislation would also require a medical examination of the patients, and the health-care provider would have to provide “a medical waste ‘catch kit’ and red bag disposal system, along with instructions for returning the waste to a health-care provider for proper handling.”
In effect, this bill would end telehealth abortion care and mail-order mifepristone. Anyone who somehow meets all those requirements would have to collect everything that comes out of their vagina after a medication abortion and return it in-person to their provider for disposal. All of this is purportedly to save our water supply from contamination.
This is impractical, more than a little gross, and downright cruel. While the legislation might be wrapped in seemingly progressive environmental language, it’s clearly meant to punish abortion patients. Republicans in Congress have tried to use bogus environmental arguments to undermine abortion rights before, yet when it comes to actual, known sources of pollution and contamination, their party is all about deregulation. The GOP’s hypocrisy is showing.
Mifepristone has no known environmental harms
In a March 18, 2026 press release, Miller argued that “more than 50 tons of chemically tainted medical waste—including blood, placental tissue, and human remains—are flushed into U.S. water systems each year as a result of these drugs,” saying the statistic “raises serious concerns about environmental contamination.”
Miller should know that this is untrue. The New York Times reported in October 2025 that scientists told Republican lawmakers that there is no Environmental Protection Agency-approved way to detect mifepristone in wastewater.
As supposed evidence to back her claim, Miller cites Students for Life America, a youth group whose mission is to “abolish abortion,” linking to its webpage on so-called “chemical” abortion. The website is full of statistics and graphics about how medications can impact our groundwater.
Some of that information may be true. Trace amounts of many medications—from antibiotics and antidepressants, to contraceptives and steroids—end up in our water supply. Endocrine disrupters like steroids have been found to decrease fertility in fish and even cause fish to change sexes. Scientists are evaluating concerns that antibiotics in water may increase antibiotic resistance in some bacteria.
But as the Guttmacher Institute, a policy and research organization specializing in sexual and reproductive health and rights, explains, “there is no evidence to suggest that mifepristone is harming the environment or people’s health.”
That likely explains why the anti-abortion organization Students for Life cites no sources for its claim that more than 50 tons of chemical waste from abortion ended up in our drinking water in 2024. One video mentions a “first of its kind national study” that found traces of mifepristone in wastewater in several major cities, but I could find no further information about this alleged “study”—not the year, the title, the authors, or anything else.
That conveniently makes the assertion impossible to investigate or invalidate.
Mifepristone helps thousands of people, hurts zero fish
A medication abortion is an alternative to a procedural abortion, meaning either aspiration or dilation and evacuation (D&E). Both of these are typically performed by a health-care provider at a medical facility.
A patient can also self-manage a medication abortion. There were roughly 642,700 medication abortions in the U.S. in 2023—making up nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions that year—according to Guttmacher.
Here’s how they work: A pregnant person is generally prescribed two drugs. First, they take mifepristone, which stops the pregnancy by blocking progesterone. Between 12 and 24 hours later, they take misoprostol, which causes the uterine to contract so that it can expel the built-up blood and tissue.
Typically, about one to four hours after taking the second medication, patients will feel cramps and start to bleed, according to Planned Parenthood. Some of what comes out may look like regular menstrual blood, but there will likely also be large blood clots that could be as big as a lemon. The bleeding may last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
The embryo will also come out as part of this, though it might not be distinguishable from other tissue depending on how far along the person was in their pregnancy. Medication abortions are only approved up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, so when Miller and her colleagues use phrases like “pre-born baby remains,” in their bill, it’s intentionally misleading. At ten weeks, a fetus weighs about 1.2 ounces and is roughly the size of a prune or small apricot. It is not a baby, and it does not look like a baby.
A “catch kit,” which Miller wants to force patients to use, is, apparently, a receptacle for medical waste, but I admit I don’t know exactly what that would look like. I once had to collect all of my urine for 24 hours for a kidney test. I basically had to carry around a giant jug with a handle and pee into it whenever I had to go. Medication abortion patients might be given something similar, or they might use something more like the bed pans people use in hospitals. This would be a problem for doctors to solve, I suppose.
Either way, patients would be required to sit on one of these things or hold it under their vagina for hours to comply with this legislative proposal. (It’s not clear what they would have to do for the next few days, when the bleeding slows but doesn’t entirely stop.) Then, they would have to transfer whatever they “caught” into a medical waste bag or multiple bags. And finally, they would have to take the bag(s) to their provider’s office.
Don’t fall for it
Medication abortions have become more popular in recent years as some states restricted abortion access following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. They now comprise about 63 percent percent of all abortions nationwide, up from 53 percent in 2020.
Abortion opponents hate this statistic. But direct attacks on abortion are very unpopular, because as of March 2026, most people in the U.S. support legal abortion in “most” or “all” cases—60 percent nationwide, according to Pew Research. This figure includes 36 percent of Republicans, and with midterms coming, Republican lawmakers are trying to pursue their anti-abortion agenda without alienating voters.
For years, Republicans have attacked mifepristone from every direction. Most of their assaults have been based on trumped-up safety concerns—false claims that the medication is dangerous, even though decades of research and millions of real world uses worldwide disprove that claim. (Statistically, It’s safer than both Tylenol and Viagra.)
Now, they’re trying out this environmental tactic. I’m not buying it, and you shouldn’t either. (Friends don’t let friends get propagandized.)
Historically, Republican lawmakers haven’t given a shit about climate change, species extinction, or air or water quality. And today’s Republican Party is about as intensely anti-environmental as it gets.
In 2025, the Trump-appointed commissioner of the Environmental Protection Agency—the federal agency tasked with protecting the environment—cut more than 400 grants, including funding designated for improving drinking water in some areas. House GOP members have introduced the PERMIT Act, which would require states to lower water quality standards in the name of being “cost effective.”
These are not people who care about your drinking water. They are, however, politicians who care very much what goes in—and comes out—of your vagina. And that’s none of their damn business.
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