Fourteen state attorneys general, led by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, asked the Environmental Protection Agency to study the environmental impact and potential contamination of public drinking water resulting from ever-increasing use of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol. On October 14, the Democratic Caucus of the U.S. Senate shot back.

It didn’t shoot back at the attorneys general per se. It didn’t take issue with an Issues in Law and Medicine study questioning the proliferation of anti-progesterones in urban drinking water. It attacked Students for Life of America, which had vocally campaigned for the study (as well as threatened to sue the Food and Drug Administration over residual abortion drugs’ potential effect on wildlife, particularly federally protected species).

Led by Washington Senator Patty Murray, all 47 Democratic and nominally “independent” senators joined a letter criticizing an EPA study “to track the presence of the medication abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in drinking water.” Commentators see the letter as a pressure tactic to kill the study.

Although Senate Democrats claim the EPA study will “test for the first time” (emphasis mine) whether mifepristone and misoprostol can be found in drinking water, they already apparently know, a priori, that “there is no scientific evidence that would support mifepristone and misoprostol as candidates for surveillance by the EPA.” How do they know this? The primary authority they cite is a 1996 assessment—three decades ago in the middle of the pro-abortion Clinton administration—that there were no “expected adverse environmental effects” from the abortion drugs.

One wonders whether Senate Democrats would be content not to question the potential toxicity of lead in urban drinking water if somebody showed them a 1996 study that said “nothing to see here, folks!”

One would think that people nominally interested in “protecting Americans from known chemical pollutants in our water systems” might want to explore whether there might be some unknown ones. One might question, if such medications are present, whether they have any impact on the bio-sexual development of young women entering puberty or women who are currently pregnant. One might wonder whether people who are willing to delay major infrastructure projects such as dams to protect snail darters might want to do an environmental impact study on human beings. But, if you did, you wouldn’t be a member of the Democratic Caucus of the U.S. Senate.

Having adopted a “see no evil, speak no evil” approach to abortion drugs, Senator Murray and her colleagues retarget their objections elsewhere: Rather than advancing “EPA’s historic role in protecting our water … from actual threats to human health and the environment,” the current study “opens the door to new attacks on safe and accessible reproductive health care.” The three-page letter ends with six demands, ranging from justifying why the study was undertaken and its timeline to how results might be used and disclosure of any contacts between EPA and any other Americans—explicitly naming Students for Life—that might have discussed the merits of this study.

Let’s intimidate anybody who questions the unquestionable safety of abortion drugs about which we do not want to ask questions. Even if one were agnostic about the value of pharmaceutically induced abortions, wouldn’t concern for public health demonstrate a willingness to ask questions? After all, if there’s nothing to hide, what are you afraid of?

But abortion has always been the exception to protocols applicable anywhere else in real medicine and public health. It’s why abortion clinic oversight is often lax, why regulations that might impinge on abortion numbers (such as restricting performance to physicians) or patient safety (such as requiring those physicians to have admitting privileges at hospitals) are called “TRAPS” (targeted restrictions on abortion providers). It’s the public health equivalent of “shout your abortion!” Don’t ask lest we receive an answer we don’t like.

This is a social justice question. Regardless of whether you think women should be resorting essentially to do-it-yourself abortions provided by “providers” who never physically touch their “patients” and leave them to their own devices, the rest of us have a legitimate basis to ask whether the growth in abortion-by-pill has impact on the ambient environment and water, especially water consumed by pregnant women who may not “choose” to be exposed to mifepristone or young girls entering puberty who may not “choose” to have external hormones or anti-hormonal agents introduced into their bodies. Nobody would expect those populations to tolerate ambient second-hand smoke. Concern for these women is actual “reproductive justice.”

The one lesson to be extrapolated from Murray’s letter is the slavish devotion to abortion one can expect of a Democratic Caucus if it manages to gain a Senate majority. If Democrats take the Senate along with the House, it is possible they could attempt to attach a kind of “anti-Hyde Amendment” to the EPA appropriations bill: a rider banning funds for studies of mifepristone and misoprostol.