Abortion opponents have spent years urging the Trump administration to limit the availability of abortion pills, and while they haven’t gotten their way yet, urgent threats remain (sign our Trump, Don’t Ban Mifepristone petition here). This has left the anti-abortion movement desperately seeking other avenues to ban abortion, such as pushing the preposterous claim that medication abortion is a water pollutant.

Those claims are laughably ridiculous at face value because there is literally zero science to back it up, but in actuality, reveal a concerning rift in activists’ rhetoric beyond usual anti-abortion disinformation, echoing the broader conservative political sphere’s fixation on “purity,” “clean” living, and “natural” health that harkens back to a long tradition of promoting racism and eugenics to achieve societal “purity.”

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life and one of the most vocal proponents of these unfounded pollution allegations, told Politico: “We developed a strategy of throwing everything we possibly can against chemical abortion, because we have far too many years of experience in the pro-life movement of hanging our hope on one specific strategy, one specific piece of legislation, to only be disappointed.”

Her organization is pushing the so-called “Clean Water for All Life Act” at federal and state levels, premised on the scientifically-refuted claim that the post-Dobbs increase in medication abortions is polluting waterways with concentrations of mifepristone high enough to cause fertility issues in the general populace. Unsurprisingly, SFLA cites heavily biased “research” that they themselves commissioned to support their claims. (Their so-called proof is far from scientifically objective, with SFLA’s “research” appearing in a journal published by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the shadowy association incorporated just weeks after the 2022 Roe reversal with the apparent goal of using the federal courts to ban medication abortion.)

Anti-abortion lobbyists’ newfound focus on supposed water pollution is also a likely appeal to the growing Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) tent—a right-wing faction best known for its hard line rejection of modern medical interventions and “Big Pharma.”

Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL), the primary sponsor of the federal Clean Water for All Life Act, painted a particularly grim picture of the growing use of abortion pills, calling their proliferation “a crisis for the environment and for just human health” that “harms women, degrades human dignity, and contaminates our environment.”

This feigned environmentalism plays right into the MAHA ideology’s obsession with purity. While some MAHA-proposed measures such as limiting food additives address valid concerns, some in the same coalition of activists are simply fabricating alleged public health threats. For example, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the indisputable public face of MAHA, has proposed to remove fluoride from drinking water, boost loosely-defined “alternative and holistic approaches” outside of conventional medical care, and limit restrictions on raw, unpasteurized milk—policies that flout decades of public health gains. But the public consensus is that fluoride has significantly improved Americans’ dental health and pasteurization is essential to reducing the risk of food-borne illnesses.

MAHA’s purity politics become even more worrisome when you consider its most prominent ‘cause,’ making vaccine skepticism mainstream. Over a twenty-year push, RFK Jr. and his disciples have publicly railed against vaccines, spreading cruel, dangerous claims about vaccinations and autism, in contradiction to decades of scientific consensus . Encouraging vaccination opt-outs is bad for the individuals who go on to contract diseases that could have been avoided, bad for public health as a whole, and carelessly subjects immunocompromised individuals who are unable to receive vaccines to heightened risk—illuminating MAHA’s proximity to eugenics.

According to one infectious disease expert, this willingness to gamble with health outcomes “will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive, and many, if not all, will suffer.” While MAHA proponents claim that making medicine more holistic and less commercialized is a primary goal, a disregard for the consequences of backtracking on scientific progress reinforces a social order in which difference or disability could be death sentences.

These are the very same worldviews espoused by eugenicists throughout history to justify the oppression of those with traits considered undesirable. Take for example, how the “one-drop rule” of racial classification upheld a white supremacist racial hierarchy, in which white “purity” was strictly presented as of paramount concern.

Natural. Pure. Clean. These terms and concepts surface again and again in MAHA and anti-abortion spheres. But now, in 2026, the anti-abortion movement and MAHA’s hyper fixation on purity isn’t limited to disinformation about abortion-tainted water. The White House’s goal of “securing” the border, for example, is a thinly veiled attempt to protect an American national identity defined by whiteness and threatened by the country’s shifting racial demographics. Increased messaging that conservatives must revive the status of the American family and offset the “birth dearth” has led to the growth of pro-natalist policies, which may at first seem to be harmlessly promoting family growth but are actually part of a broader effort to shore up white Christian nationalist political aims.

Just weeks ago, right-wing activist Jack Posobiec joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to fear-monger about the dwindling white population and forced racial integration: “They’re taking white areas, and they’re importing Muslims and Somalians and Africans into them,” Posobiec said. “Why was this done? This was done to break up racial homogeneity and political homogeneity in these areas.”

“Homogeneity” is yet another “purity” dog whistle. It’s no surprise, then, that Students for Life—one of the primary sources of disinformation claims that abortion pills allegedly jeopardize the purity of our “crystal-clear” water—has buddied up with Posobiec. The group invited him to give the keynote address at their annual conference earlier this year, with SFLA leader Kristan Hawkins even writing on X that she was “thrilled to welcome this warrior for Life.”

 In its latest stunt to the capture the attention of environmentalists, Students for Life recently threatened to sue the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), accusing the agency of violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing “mifepristone-poisoned waste” to harm animal populations at risk of extinction. Hawkins suggested in the group’s press release, “You don’t have to be pro-life to want clean drinking water.”

But that hasn’t stopped Hawkins from wading into environmental activism only when it benefits the anti-abortion movement’s bottom line. Transparently gloating to Politico about possible remuneration if her crusade against mifepristone succeeds, Hawkins commented, “There’s the potential for hundreds of billions of dollars in damages if I ‘Erin Brockovich’ this case.”

Unlike Brockovich’s consumer advocacy and environmental activism, however, Students for Life’s misinformation campaign is hardly altruistic, instead using targeted language to engage MAHA interests—no matter how damaging revoking mifepristone access will be for the millions of Americans who have abortions in a move that, if successful, will be entirely counteractive to making Americans healthier again.