Repercussion Section: Renouncing My Common Ground Essay on Prenatal Threats

by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist

Fifteen years ago, in an entirely different political moment, I wrote an essay arguing that pro-life and pro-choice could find common ground over the issue of prenatal toxicants. 

I no longer believe this is possible. And I no longer believe the search for such a thing is worth any sort of time or effort. Indeed, the very attempt would represent, to me, in this current political moment, a betrayal of my most deeply held values. 

So, with this column, I retract the one I wrote in 2009. I renounce it. 

I once had a lot of conservative readers because I grew up in a deeply religious community in rural central Illinois, and I wrote about the beauty of landscape there and helped some heroic farmers defeat a trash incinerator siting near my grandfather’s farm, among other things. Some of rural activists I worked with had developed their political skills blocking access to Planned Parenthood clinics to women seeking abortions.

Here’s how I, a pro-choice adoptee who had had an abortion and wanted to talk openly about it, spoke to that deep-red readership at the dawn of the Obama Administration:

If you believe that unborn life is paramount, there is a conversation we need to have with each other, and that is a conversation about chemicals that have the ability to enter a woman’s body and sabotage her pregnancy. Abortion means more than a Planned Parenthood clinic. It also refers to what we in the scientific community call “spontaneous abortions,” what women call miscarriages, the risks of which go up when certain pollutants enter the opera of embryonic development at certain key moments.

Methoxychlor, a common pesticide, has the ability, at vanishingly small concentrations, to prevent embryonic implantation. So do certain solvents. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, an ingredient of air pollution, can kill eggs in the ovary. In California, the closer a woman lives to agricultural fields where pesticides are sprayed, the higher her risk of stillbirth due to birth defects. PCBs and DDT are linked to preterm birth, a leading cause of infant death and disability…. Are these not pro-life issues?”

And here’s how I ended that essay:

I fervently wish for my daughter the right to determine her own reproductive path as well as the right to a pregnancy undisrupted by toxic chemicals. That feels like two sides of the same precious coin.

I have often wondered what it would be like to bring all my audiences, pro-choice and pro-life, into one great amphitheater to begin the environmental conversation I imagine. I could start with the sentence that is always an applause line no matter whom I am addressing: “Let’s agree that any chemical with the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy.”

Yeah, no. Never doing that. 

Here’s what’s changed for me: I no longer believe that fetal sanctity is—or ever was—the guiding light behind the ascendency and triumphalism of the right-to-life movement. 

Fresh from overturning Roe, leaders of this movement are willing to deny abortions to women bleeding out in parking lots or descending into sepsis in hospital beds even when those pregnancies have zero chance of ending in the birth of a living baby. Many of these leaders also openly advocate for restrictions on birth control, which obviates the need for abortions. 

And they freely admit that increasing the domestic supply of adoptable infants is part of the goal. Indeed, during oral arguments for the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett argued that the provision of safe-haven baby boxes—in which infants can be anonymously surrendered for adoption—takes care of the problem of unwanted pregnancies. 

Never mind that terminating parental rights and relinquishing a child for adoption by strangers—whether at a hospital bedside or in a box at the local fire station—is so profoundly traumatic that, according to a recent longitudinal study, 91 percent of women with unwanted pregnancies who were denied abortions chose to go on to parent their children. 

The same investigation, the so-called Turn Away Study, found that women denied abortions are more likely to die, more likely to stay with abusive partners, and four times more likely to fall into poverty. The well-being of their other children suffers, and the implications for the children born of unwanted pregnancy are also serious. 

Hence, going forward, I will only be discussing the topic of prenatal toxic exposures within the context of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. 

In other words, I believe that our collective failure to ban and regulate chemicals that damage fetal development represents a threat to the bodily integrity of the person who is pregnant. 

In other words, I believe that the new study showing that exposure to nanoplastics decreases umbilical cord flow and the other one showing the presence of microplastics in 62 percent of human placentas and the other one showing that mothers with higher blood levels of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”) during pregnancy are 1.5-times more likely to give birth to a preterm baby… I believe that all of these findings point to widespread infringements on the sovereignty of the pregnant body. 

Developmental toxicants that cross placentas violate the reproductive rights of the people who are pregnant. As do abortion bans. Period.