Republican Lawmakers Ask EPA to Add Mifepristone to Contaminant Candidate List

Republican lawmakers from the House and Senate sent a letter on June 11, 2026, asking Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to add mifepristone to the agency’s sixth Contaminant Candidate List. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey and Sen.

James Lankford of Oklahoma led the group of 16 GOP lawmakers. The letter asks the EPA to place the drug on CCL 6, the list that identifies contaminants in public water systems not currently subject to regulation. The lawmakers stated that mifepristone impacts nearly 11 percent of women who take it.

93 percent, of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging or another serious adverse event within 45 days. “In addition to killing unborn babies and threatening the well-being or lives of their mothers, Mifepristone has the potential to impact our national water system, a danger that was acknowledged by the Food and Drug Administration thirty years ago,” the lawmakers wrote.

They cited a 1996 FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research statement that adverse environmental effects from mifepristone were “not anticipated,” while noting that the drug may enter the environment from excretion by patients, disposal of pharmaceutical waste, or emissions from manufacturing sites.

The letter requests that the EPA determine whether active metabolites from mifepristone abortions threaten access to safe drinking water. It also asks the agency to study whether the level of mifepristone present in the nation’s water system is significant enough to cause endocrine disruption.

The letter arrives as the FDA conducts a safety study of mifepristone analyzing hundreds of thousands of cases, with interim results potentially released in July.