Full Petition Text: Tell Walgreens And CVS To Keep the Abortion Pill Out Of Pharmacies

Dear CVS and Walgreens, 

 

The first line of the oath of a pharmacist is “I will consider the welfare of humanity and relief of suffering my primary concerns.” Taking this oath means you will heal and restore the health of the people you serve. When a pharmacist fails to protect human life, they fail their oath. 

In 2023 you made a costly decision. When the FDA made a regulatory change, you decided to dispense the lethal chemical abortion pill Mifepristone in your stores. 

In doing this, you have abandoned your responsibility to the people you serve. You have failed your oath. 

Since the 19th century, your neighborhood pharmacies have been there to help and heal the community. Since those days, you have used slogans like “On the corner of happy and healthy” and, “Health is everything.” Yet now, you are actively choosing to deviate from that long-standing moral path by deciding to dispense a death pill. Dispensing these pills means you are choosing to become abortion facilities, filling bottles with deadly poison meant to end the life of a precious child. 

We are writing this letter demanding you backtrack from this decision or risk irreversible harm to your brand and customer base. 

In a recent study, The Guttmacher Institute estimates chemical abortions made up 53% of all US abortions in 2020, and that number is expected to increase exponentially in 2023 due to this new expansion. 

Chemical abortion is a two-step process that violently ends the life of a young human child. The first pill deprives the growing child in the womb of nutrients so that the baby starves to death; the second pill is meant to expel the dead child from her mother’s uterus. 

Whether or not a chemical abortion takes place at home or at the abortion facility, you are responsible for the deaths of these innocent children. Furthermore, dispensing these pills even by prescription puts you in clear dereliction of duty as a medical provider, placing mothers in potential danger. 

Allowing the mother to purchase an abortion pill from your pharmacy means she is likely to not have been offered any labs, tests, or exams that would rule out dangerous ectopic pregnancies, confirm gestational age and blood type, and other vital information. 

Having a prescription does not make chemical abortion safe. Even with a prescription, dispensing chemical abortion puts the life of the mother at risk. 

By dispensing abortion pills, you are encouraging women to commit these very dangerous abortions at home, without medical supervision, and most often alone. 

You are the community pharmacy meant to support health and well-being, but your partnership with the abortion industry makes it even easier to kill a child and do physical and emotional harm to the mother. Choosing to dispense abortion pills means your brand no longer upholds its mission and trusted values. 

No pharmacist should be forced or coerced by their employer to provide abortifacients that break their oath and moral conscience. To protect the health of all patients, certain medications have been and should be restricted to settings where a patient’s health can be monitored. 

Pharmacists at your practices are not equipped with any resources outside of referring to other providers to help a patient with deadly complications. 

Dispensing death pills does NOT protect patients. It will kill the child in the womb and will likely harm the mother.  

True health care heals; it does not kill. Stop dispensing death. Women can die. Children will die, because this pill will kill.