US Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin speaks during a press conference at the G20 Ministerial meeting on Energy Abundance, in Houston, Texas, on September 14, 2026.Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP
With his characteristic deregulatory zeal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced before an audience of G20 energy ministers in oil-rich Houston, Texas, that his agency would eliminate climate pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. “For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in an EPA press statement issued during the Houston meeting. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.”
This announcement was yet another example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to reinforce what Republicans have long considered a priority: freedom from government intrusion or regulation. But only a few days before Zeldin reassured energy executives that the government would no longer prioritize protecting public health, the EPA announced a new study that would test the country’s water supply for abortion medication, contraception, and hormones used in gender-affirming care, along with over 1,000 other medications and chemicals. “We have heard loud and clear that Americans are concerned about potential unknown pollutants lurking in their drinking water,” Zeldin wrote in the study press release.
“The Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”
The testing of abortion medication has been championed by anti-abortion groups for years, especially by Kristan Hawkins, the leader of Students for Life, who tweeted a video of herself receiving the news that the study was made public. In her post, she wrote:
“BREAKING: The EPA will now test water for abortion pill pollution!! The FDA has recklessly, negligently allowed chemical abortion pills on the market and deregulated them. They’ve killed millions of babies, harmed mothers, and polluted our water for 26 years. For the last year, we’ve been calling on President Trump’s EPA to find out what’s in our water. After more than three years of innovative water testing, a peer-reviewed research paper, and the introduction of legislation in states, the Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”
The EPA’s unrelated but tandem announcements reveal an agency that has fundamentally overhauled its policies toward environmental and human health in pursuit of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” and “Make America Healthy Again” agendas. Rolling back power plant pollution standards will lead to higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels, as well as increased levels of smog, mercury, and lead contamination, which can cause health problems.
Coal and natural gas-fueled power plants are the second-largest carbon polluter in the United States, behind the transportation sector. Under the Biden administration, carbon pollution rules for power plant emissions standards would have reduced carbon emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047. The recently announced plan will repeal these Biden-era regulations and could prevent future administrations from curbing carbon emissions. First reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA’s latest move caps off a year and a half of the agency’s overhaul of federal climate policy. In February, the EPA rescinded similar climate vehicle standards and the 2009 endangerment finding, the landmark ruling that asserted greenhouse gases threaten human health.
Much to the dismay of anti-abortion activists, the number of abortions in the United States has actually increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. One reason for this has been access to abortion medication, the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that act to terminate pregnancies. This has activated the anti-abortion movement to find new approaches to ending the procedure, and one of them has been environmental: focusing on the alleged presence of these medications in the water supply.
After Republican lawmakers urged the EPA to take up the water study in June, Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The 19th that, compared to other pharmaceuticals, mifepristone is taken as a one-time dose by a small portion of the population. “There are legitimate water quality threats that we need to attack and rectify in a regulatory manner,” Donley said. “And then there are things that are out in left field that just distract people.”
Meanwhile, monitoring the water supply—which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote will “give Americans the truth about what is in their water”—may actually co-opt environmental policy to pursue anti-abortion policy. “I am deeply concerned,” Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water, told Politico. “If there is any detectable level of mifepristone or its metabolites, the anti-abortion groups will scream that we are unknowingly aborting fetuses by drinking public tap water.”
According to Politico, the EPA insists the study will only determine if a chemical is present in the water supply, not its concentration. But pro-choice activists caution that the study could still pave the way for abortion access restrictions. “If the test finds any trace of abortion pills, conservatives will use it to legitimize their new legal front in the war on reproductive rights,” wrote activist and writer Jessica Valenti on her Substack, Abortion, Every Day. “The cruelty really is the point here, not science or health.”
As for the EPA’s other effort? Environmental groups are already planning their legal challenges to the EPA’s latest climate policy rollback. “The Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, told The Guardian. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”
