In Pursuit of Purity: Environmental Affects, Reproduction, and the Promise of Bodily Sovereignty

Molly M. Henderson

In The New York Times on October 10, 2025, an article titled “The E.P.A. Followed Up on an Unusual Request About Abortion Pills” described a growing concern regarding “abortion pollution.” The article argued for an unsubstantiated theory that mifepristone contaminates U.S. water supplies, potentially threatening wildlife and human health.^[1] The conservative group Students for Life of America (SFLA) has been promoting this concern since 2022, shortly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In a response published in Ms. Magazine, feminist legal scholar Carrie N. Baker characterized the Times piece as “uncritically repeating antiabortion talking points.”^[2] Baker notes that the Times article fails to mention that environmental experts have dismissed these claims and that there is no existing evidence that the trace amounts of mifepristone in wastewater could harm humans, animals, or environments after going through standard wastewater treatment systems.^[3]

Antiabortion activists who promote baseless anxieties around “abortion pollution” and “chemical abortion” amplify environmental affects of distrust and longstanding feminist concerns surrounding tensions between reproductive technology and bodily autonomy.^[4] Leveraging legitimate concerns around pollution and reproductive coercion, antiabortion activists redirect and distort these concerns toward a conservative political project that ultimately opposes both environmental health and reproductive rights. In the process, they trade on the attrition of bodily sovereignty in an era defined by environmental degradation and the constraint of reproductive autonomy.

Anxieties that synthetic hormones are passing from human bodies into wastewaters, and from there to rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans, predate this current inflection point. This perceived collision of the “unnatural” with the “natural” draws on enduring environmental affects surrounding the pollution of purity and the incursion of civilization into wilderness.^[5] Since the publication of the bestselling Silent Spring in 1962, Americans have become increasingly aware of the potentially toxic relationship between manmade chemicals and natural ecosystems. During the post-World War II expansion of the military industrial complex, manufacturers produced and distributed new variants of synthetic chemical compounds that flowed from their sites of production into bodies of water, workers, and consumers alike. In the 1970s, a surging environmental movement elevated the pollution of the environment to a national concern. Environmental justice activists soon demonstrated how the chemical burden of toxic contamination was unevenly distributed between the poor and the rich as well as the marginalized and the powerful, with the most adverse impacts on Black, Native, Latinx, and Asian American communities.^[6]

What is notable about contemporary discourses is how they activate cultural anxieties surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality. A recurring worry surrounding synthetic estrogen’s passage through wastewaters into animals hinges on its endocrine-disrupting effects.^[7] Anti-toxics discourses about the “feminization” of animal species have circulated since at least the 1990s, most notably surrounding research on the purported chemical-induced sex-reversal in frogs exposed to pollutants such as Atrazine, an herbicide. While environmentalists have used this research to campaign against the chemical pollution of the environment by the agricultural chemical firm Syngenta, conservatives have amplified it in service of anti-trans and anti-queer crusades.^[8] Political ecologist Giovanna Di Chiro argues that narratives around endocrine disruptors and frogs draw on existing current in environmental politics, which affirms that “toxic chemical pollution is responsible for the undermining of perversion of the ‘natural.'”^[9] Tropes of gender-bending or disabled amphibians, environmental theorist Alexis Shotwell writes, hinge on the fear that frogs represent an indicator species portending wider effects of environmental pollution – a “cohabitant of toxic worlds who might show us what sex and gender dangers we’re courting through our chemical habit.”^[10]

Likewise, concerns surrounding chemical incursions into bodies have circulated within feminist and women’s health networks for decades, and for good reason. Marginalized people’s mistrust of the medical establishment is the result of centuries of violence in which medical technologies have been developed through the coercion, assault, and immiseration of the enslaved, those designated as “unfit” or “feebleminded” or “hysterical,” the incarcerated, and the colonized.^[11] Extending from the founding of gynecology through medical experimentation on enslaved Black women to the turn of the century eugenics movement and midcentury birth control clinic trials in Puerto Rico, American reproductive healthcare has long entrenched oppression alongside constrained forms of liberation.^[12] For example, the man-made estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES), created in 1938 and prescribed to between 4 and 6 million American women from 1948 to 1971, promised to, among other ends, prevent miscarriages, treat menopause, dry up breast milk in non-nursing mothers, and act as a “morning after” contraceptive. Far from delivering on these promises, the widespread prescription of DES ultimately resulted in heightened rates of breast cancer among mothers and higher risks of cancers and genital variations in children exposed to DES during infancy.^[13] The fallout from DES, compounding prior and ongoing medical coercion, thus affirmed women’s distrust of the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the women’s health movement problematized the relationship between newly proliferating contraceptive technologies and the subjugation of women under patriarchal capitalism.^[14] In the first edition of the series Our Bodies, Ourselves from 1970, titled Women and Their Bodies, authors argued that the birth control pill was oriented around expanding corporate earnings rather than women’s liberation or reproductive freedom, which left drug companies with little incentive to reduce the health hazards or side effects posed by the Pill while profiting from women with few, and flawed, birth control alternatives.^[15] Some women’s health activists, during a nationwide “Pill Scare” sparked by scientific studies linking the hormonal contraception to blood clots and an increased risk of breast cancer, turned to the diaphragm (and spermicidal jelly) as an alternative. Some feminists, writes Lea Eisenstein, interpreted this return to what in the late 1960s was widely regarded as an “outdated contraceptive method” as a reclamation of “all the feminist values the Pill could never promise: total bodily autonomy, sexual agency, and self-discovery.”^[16]

From the 1970s onwards, racial disparities in the prescription of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as the Dalkon Shield, Norplant, and Depo-Provera brought renewed scrutiny to birth control’s use as a tool of racial control.^[17] Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, feminist health activists have balanced ideological opposition to a racist, patriarchal medical establishment against material needs for contraception and reproductive healthcare. This balancing act requires negotiation over how bodily autonomy reifies or rejects fantasies of purity; in other words, it challenges feminists to simultaneously affirm self-determination while reckoning with systemic entanglements.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reproductive justice activists have placed renewed attention on medication abortion as a means to safely terminate pregnancies across state lines.^[18] This campaign has required, among other tactics, challenging the antiabortion assertion that so-called “chemical abortion” is dangerous or unnatural.^[19] In an era in which access to abortion is strictly surveilled and criminalized and, moreover, as access to gender affirming care is curtailed and stigmatized, bodily autonomy remains, as ever, far out of reach.^[20]

This brings us back to the so-called “abortion pollution” resulting from the passage of mifepristone from bodies into waterways. Drawing on environmentalists’ ingrained distrust toward polluting industries and government regulatory power, coupled with feminists’ and marginalized communities’ longstanding distrust of medical institutions’ ability to support reproductive freedom, antiabortion groups like SFLA activists pull at long historical threads when claiming that mifepristone poses risks not only to human health but also to nature. In so doing, they weaponize legitimate historical concerns in service of a project that undermines access to bodily autonomy even as it professes to expand it, abridging reproductive rights and neglecting existing environmental injustices. Referencing Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of wellness cultures, theorist Naomi Klein writes, “we turn toward the body when life seems out of control.”^[21] In a moment where access to bodily sovereignty is narrowing as a result of enduring processes of environmental contamination and exploitation alongside reproductive medicalization, coercion, and criminalization, “abortion pollution” fearmongering capitalizes on extant affects of distrust in order to further chip away at autonomy.

Proponents of “abortion pollution” theories exercise a form of coercion rooted in dual concepts of purity, both bodily and environmental. Neglecting the solidarities forged within what Anna Tsing calls “contaminated diversity,” such theories maintain the fiction that purity is an option.^[22] Anti-abortion activists espousing such theories challenge environmental contamination only insofar as it is linked to the decline of gender essentialism and heteronormativity (which are, themselves, unnatural).^[23] Rather than, in the words of Sunaura Taylor, “living well with impaired landscapes,” they seek to reassert sovereignty over bodies and ecosystems through totalizing regimes of normality.^[24] These regimes direct focus to the body of the individual as a site of the exercise of sovereignty, neglecting structural forms of regulation as well as collective forms of care and repair.^[25] But pursuits of purity are themselves polluted, constraining rather than expanding the autonomy they promise.

Featured image courtesy SHVETS production.

Molly M. Henderson

Molly M. Henderson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book project, Reproductive Ecologies: Children and Conceptions of the Future in American Environmentalisms, examines the role of reproductive health and politics in shaping the environmental history of the late 20th century United States.

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