Students for Life of America, a leading pro-life advocacy group, released a letter Thursday announcing its intent to sue the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over alleged Endangered Species Act violations tied to pharmaceutical waste from the chemical abortion pill mifepristone.

In July, the group announced a peer-reviewed study published in Issues in Law & Medicine, a journal of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (JAHM), that found significant levels of mifepristone in all but one of nine sampling classes of water collected in three U.S. cities, including in some tap water. After months of pressing the FDA over those contaminants, the group is taking another step by putting the agency on formal notice that it intends to sue.

“FDA is thus in violation of Section 7 of the ESA for failing to engage in consultation with the Services in connection with approving mifepristone and issuing REMS for it,” the letter states. “SFLA, its affiliates, and its members enjoy recreating, observing, and studying endangered species impacted by this decision and have plans to continue doing so in the future.”

“By failing to follow the substantive and procedural requirements of the ESA, FDA has injured and continues to injure SFLA, its affiliates, and their members. Per this notice, the ESA gives FDA 60 days to resolve these violations. If it does not do so, we will pursue litigation,” the letter adds.

The letter, sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, and acting Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director Michael Davis, says the organization is seeking to prevent the “dumping of mifepristone into the waterways of the United States and the inevitable harm that has occurred and will continue to occur for endangered species.”

According to the study published earlier this year, researchers tested water from Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Carbondale, Illinois; including household taps. The study found significant levels of anti-progesterone activity consistent with mifepristone in eight of nine sampling classes, with concentrations reaching 0.041 micrograms per liter, and concluded conventional treatment did not reliably remove the contaminant.

Students for Life America’s letter says animals listed under the Endangered Species Act, including freshwater mussels such as the Balcones spike, Texas fawnsfoot, fatmucket, and pimpleback, are “uniquely vulnerable to such exposures, given their particular susceptibility to chemical pollution from wastewater effluent.”

“Anyone who has paid attention to the scope of the impact of the Endangered Species Act can tell you that ignoring risks to species at risk of extinction is not acceptable. We wish that risk to preborn babies and their mothers matter as much. But as a matter of law, we don’t have to show harm to endangered species, we need to show risk,” Kristi Hamrick, Students for Life America’s vice president of media and policy, told the Daily Signal.

“Studies in other countries show risk. A peer reviewed US study shows the presence of mifepristone and mifepristone equivalents, an endocrine blocker, which carries risk for endangered species,” Hamrick added. “A short letter from the FDA claiming that the law does not apply will not cut it, legally or practically. The ESA is a serious law and we have serious concerns.” 

The group is giving the FDA 60 days to pull mifepristone from the market and begin Endangered Species Act review. The letter says more than 50 tons of blood and placental tissue contaminated with mifepristone are expelled into U.S. waterways each year. 

“The FDA has 60 days to pull the drug from the market and begin real evaluation. Their own forms show that compliance with the ESA is a regular checkpoint,” Hamrick told the Daily Signal. “As a result of federal policy, more than 50 tons of chemically tainted blood and placenta tissue, along with human remains and waste, go into our waterway each year. Hospitals and outpatient medical facilities can’t flush pathological medical waste.”

The pro-life group says endangered or threatened species exist in all 50 states and that a progesterone blocker may affect more than 1,500 protected species. The group said it named some of those species in the notice and circulated a broader list to state attorneys general. 

“In each of the 50 states, there are endangered species. We named some in the Notice of Intent to Sue, but we have circulated to attorneys general the broader list,” Hamrick said. 

“You don’t have to be pro-life to want clean drinking water. And you don’t have to be pro-life to want endangered species to be protected.”

DENVER, CO — A major airline company announced that it had carefully considered all its employees and made sure that the most heavily accented person would make all gate announcements for passengers in the terminal.

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U.S. — The Babylon Bee is excited to publicly release our first official staff photo in five years, with a huge thanks to the expert visual media team from Stanford University who made it possible.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., is introducing legislation to end commercial birth tourism in the United States, a move that could cut off a pipeline that foreign nationals use to gain citizenship for their children.

After President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birth tourism was struck down by the Supreme Court, Scott is taking a different approach.

The Birth Tourism Elimination Act seeks to prohibit foreign nationals from using temporary travel visas to give birth inside the country for the purpose of obtaining citizenship for their children. It will also target companies that assist and charge foreign nationals seeking help facilitating their travel.

“American citizenship is not for sale, and foreign nationals have no right to buy citizenship for their children,” Scott said in a statement provided to the Daily Signal. 

“The birth tourism industry has disrespected what it means to be an American by selling and profiting from the freedoms and values that men and women across our country died for,” he continued. “We are blessed to live in the greatest nation on God’s green Earth, and my bill makes it clear that our temporary travel programs cannot be exploited for the purpose of obtaining American citizenship.” 

Following the Supreme Court’s July ruling against Trump’s executive order restricting automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to foreign nationals, Scott announced he would introduce legislation to “end the ‘birth tourism’ industry once and for all.” 

The Supreme Court ruled that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are granted citizenship and are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at birth. Instead of challenging who qualifies for birthright citizenship, Scott’s new legislation codifies the State Department’s 2020 restriction on using B visas for birth tourism and targets the commercial operations that facilitate it.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, roughly 25,000 children are born in the United States each year to foreign nationals and receive U.S. citizenship at birth.

You Win USA Vacation Services Corp. is just one example of a company that assists foreign families, primarily Chinese citizens, charging them tens of thousands of dollars to organize their travel and birth in the United States. According to the Department of Justice, in 2019, the organization was charged with assisting more than 500 Chinese births and collecting $3 million in international wire transfers from China over two years. 

Border czar Tom Homan agrees that this is not a new problem, calling it a “national security threat.” 

“Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I’ve been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth,” Homan said on Fox News ahead of the July Supreme Court hearing. 

While the Evergreen State is most famous as the setting for the hit NBC sitcom Frasier, actual people live there, too. Could you be the next one to call it home?

The United Nations is bloated, duplicative, and inefficient, according to UN Ambassador Mike Waltz. But despite its flaws, he thinks the organization is worth saving.

“You need one place in the world where everybody can come and talk, and at least talk,” he told the Daily Signal in a phone call from the 2026 United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “I’ve learned as a diplomat, especially in some of these war-torn environments with 1000-year-old animosities, just getting both sides in the room is often a huge first step.”

Waltz has seen the benefit of the UN in action with the war between Ukraine and Russia.

“At the beginning of the president’s term, there was no one talking from either side,” he said. “Now we’ve had multiple rounds of pulling them together, and we’ll see. Hopefully, by the end of this year, we can get both [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and [Vladimir] Putin at least in the same room to begin a conversation, so the president’s willing to engage anyone anywhere to try to craft a deal for peace, and for all of its flaws, the UN is a key place to do that.”

The same is true with the Iran conflict, he said. President Donald Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials held talks on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly amid the two countries’ more than six-month-long war.

“It’s the only place where you get 150 prime ministers, presidents, world leaders, finance ministers all here at the same time, and the interesting thing about it is, you can have those conversations even with our adversaries,” he said. “We’ll see how it unfolds.”

“It’s notable that it was the first contact since the ceasefire with Iran, since they violated it by attacking international shipping and fell apart,” he said. “But it was a good kind of reengagement. I’ll let the president decide where it goes next.”

The UN also helps with burden sharing, part of America First foreign policy, Waltz said. A UN force has gone into Gaza, preventing the U.S. from having to send troops. UN troops are taking care of gangs in Haiti to prevent that instability from spreading.

“We are a generous nation,” he said. “We do help out people in need in situations like earthquakes and tsunamis and famines, and there’s a role for that as well.”

Waltz has been working to reduce the UN budget, slashing $1 billion in the past six months.

“The UN’s done nothing but grow for 80 years,” he said. “We’ve seen a tripling of their budget in the last 25 years. I would argue strongly we haven’t seen a tripling of peace break out around the world.”

The U.S. is trying to return the UN to the basics.

“We came in here determined to reform and and drive efficiencies,” Waltz said, “and we’ve by all accounts, achieved some historic success.”

As the UN searches for a new secretary general, Waltz said he wants the role to be filled by someone who takes after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

“We need that same kind of leadership for the UN,” he said, “so we’re looking for the right leader from anywhere in the world, man, woman. Really, we’re focused on merit, and to get this organization really involved in ending wars, bringing peace, and helping President Trump in that regard on the world stage.”

Many more cost-saving reforms are to come at the UN, Waltz said.

“The average UN civil servant makes 120% of what an American civil servant makes,” he said. “The main UN locations around the world are in some of the most expensive cities in the world: New York, Geneva, and Vienna. Yet the focus of a lot of the UN’s work is in some of the most difficult and developing and war-torn places in the world.”

“Let’s get people out to where they’re needed, not in these plush cities in the United States and Europe,” he said.