INDIANAPOLIS (WRTV) — Attorney General Todd Rokita is calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to put tighter controls on the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, citing potential health risks to women who may ingest the drug from their local water supplies.
“Obviously, this starts with the individuals persuaded by Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma to use mifepristone to abort their pregnancies, but increasingly it extends to other women who might ingest the drug from their local water supplies,” Rokita said in a release issued Wednesday.
According to the release, when a woman ingests mifepristone, it blocks her natural progesterone. “Thereby chemically destroying her baby’s uterine environment and preventing the baby from receiving nutrition.”
Rokita says “the baby, in effect, is starved in the womb.”
The release claims that pregnant women who unintentionally ingest the drug through the public water supply could be at greater risk of health complications than the general population. In addition, recent research suggests that mifepristone can affect reproductive organ development and fertility.
As part of a 14-state coalition, Rokita is requesting that the EPA add mifepristone to other pharmaceuticals included on the Contaminant Candidate List, which may lead to stricter regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In March, Rokita appealed a Marion County court decision granting religious exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban. The order creates an exception to Indiana’s abortion restrictions if terminating a pregnancy aligns with a woman’s “sincere religious beliefs.”
The state’s abortion law that passed in 2022 already provided exceptions in situations of rape, incest, when it’s necessary to avoid a “serious health risk” to the mother, and when there’s a diagnosed “lethal fetal anomaly” that would lead to the child’s death within three months of birth.
“Using religion as a reason (to access abortion) is almost mind-boggling,” Larry Kunkel of Sidewalk Advocates for Life said.
Indiana Right to Life President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Fichter issued a statement Wednesday regarding Rokita’s request for the EPA to address abortion drugs in the public water supply:
“Water contamination affects everyone, regardless of where someone is on abortion issues. This is a question the EPA needs to address, and we simply can’t let the politics of abortion get in the way.
“We particularly need to know the impact this is having on women and unborn babies. If the concentration in a water supply like Marion County’s is high enough, what risks are women taking from drinking a glass of water?
“The main threat is from the illegal mailing of abortion pills into our state, all of which will eventually impact water supplies. And if abortion drugs are contaminating water supplies at the level we suspect, it needs to be stopped.”
“Chemical abortions accounted for 63 percent of all U.S. abortions in the formal health care system as of 2023, compared to 31 percent in 2014 and 14 percent in 2005,” Rokita said.
The Indiana Attorney General’s office says these numbers do not include self-managed chemical abortions that occur when abortion providers mail mifepristone in violation of state law, “which is also increasing.”
