cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/7932
House Republicans are now talking about combing through sewers in search of microscopic evidence of our abortions.
Anti-abortion activists have been trying to convince the broader public that medication abortion is dangerous for years, but their latest argument is a decades-old asinine conspiracy theory. In a June 18 letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, 25 House Republicans asked the agency to study the alleged “byproducts” of Mifepristone (the first medication administered in a medication abortion regimen) in water systems. In the letter, the Republican legislators make an unfounded assertion that “residual amounts of the drug and its metabolites” in wastewater “could potentially interfere with a person’s fertility, regardless of sex.” The anti-abortion lawmakers wanted clarification on whether the agency has methods for detecting the medication and its “byproducts” in water supplies and, if not, what resources are needed to develop such methods.
To be clear: Anti-abortion politicians want to spend government funds to investigate the claim that abortions are floating around in your drinking water.
If this preposterous claim weren’t unsettling enough, former EPA officials told The New York Times that the EPA had already developed “general technology … [that] could be used for surveillance in states where abortion is illegal.” The surveillance technology could be used to isolate the source to “a particular street or home where the pills were used, though such measures would be legally fraught and extremely costly.”
In an era when cops are using license plate readers to track people traveling for abortion care, and social media companies like Facebook are handing over private messages between a mother and daughter seeking an abortion to police leading to their incarceration, this is another alarming development.
The anti-abortion movement has been injecting this deliberate disinformation into mainstream politics for years — including this exact myth of abortion pills poisoning our water, which we detail in our book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.
From Truthout via This RSS Feed.
I mean it’s important to understand the anti-abortion proponents themselves exist as wild conspiracy theorists. Anti-abortionism is predicated on wild claims that have no basis in science and go back to bronze age superstition, mythology, and patriarchal norms. They dress it up in bad science, wild accusations, moving the goal posts, etc.
