Honoring Earth Day:
Clearing the Water of Misinformation & Disinformation about Medication Abortion
AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #69 – April 18, 2026
Greetings from the AMSA Reproductive Health Project!
As we move further from Winter and deeper into Spring, we reach the month of April, and we are looking forward to observing Earth Day on April 22. AMSA leaders played an important part in getting Earth Day established in 1970, and this is just one example of what can happen when future physicians organize themselves and leverage their collective power. AMSA, today, can be your advocacy home too; as a student-led, student-member, multi-issue education and advocacy association, AMSA can be the platform from which you speak truth to power.
In every issue of this newsletter, we seek to help you stay informed about the issues that you care about, and which have relevance to your training and future practice as a physician. This issue, in recognition of Earth Day, we will put our focus on medication abortion and dispelling misinformation and disinformation about it that weaponize environmental concerns and protections to create false narratives of water pollution dangers associated with medication abortion.
Concern for the environment and actions to institute policies which protect and preserve Earth’s ecology are aligned with the Reproductive Justice framework’s assertion that there is a universal human right to raise the children and families we do have in safe, supportive, and sustainable environments and communities.Â
But claims that the compounds in the abortion medications, mifepristone and misoprostol – anti-abortion activists will frequently refer to “chemical abortion,”
because that sounds toxic and scary – are polluting municipal water supplies are patently false.Â
These false claims – which are promoted even by US Senator Dr. Bill Cassidy – from Louisiana who is the current Chair of the Senate Health, Education Labor & Pension (HELP) Committee – and which even go so far as to suggest that our drinking water is contaminated with aborted fetuses flushed down toilets – are especially vile, given the actual abysmal state of US municipal water supplies after decades of infrastructure neglect and underfunding and insufficient federal regulation of actual pollutants, including PFAs (forever chemicals) in our drinking water.
So, while anti-abortion organizations like Students for Life intentionally spread false information (the definition of disinformation) about the supposed polluting impact of medication abortion, let’s remember that the real attacks against clean drinking water – access to which is a universal human right! – are the multinational corporations that seek to privatize and monetize water (e.g., PepsiCo, etc.) and that seek to divert drinking water to cool their Manhattan-sized data centers (e.g., Amazon, OpenAI, etc.), and that seek to ensure that toxins such as PFAs are excluded from environmental regulations.
Read on, to learn more about medication abortion misinformation & disinformation!
