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CNA Staff, Jan 9, 2025 / 14:30 pm (CNA).
Pro-life groups are criticizing a burgeoning effort to expand use of the abortion pill through pharmacist prescriptions, slamming what one advocate called an effort at “chipping away at medical standards for women.”
A pilot program launched this month in Washington state has trained pharmacists to prescribe the abortion-drug combo mifepristone and misoprostol to women seeking abortions.
The initiative — launched by the pro-abortion group Uplift International and dubbed the “Pharmacist Abortion Access Project” — uses the online pharmacy Honeybee Health to distribute the drugs. Uplift said it plans to eventually expand the program in “brick-and-mortar pharmacies” as well.
The program “is expected to be tried in other states where abortion remains legal,” the New York Times reported this week.
Michael Hogue, the chief executive of the American Pharmacists Association, told the newspaper: “I think it is going to expand, and it is expanding.”
Abortions done via medication, also called chemical abortions, currently account for about half of the abortions that are done in the United States every year. Abortion drugs are used to end the life of an unborn child up to about 10 weeks into a pregnancy.
‘Women’s lives and future fertility are at risk’
Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy at the pro-life Students for Life Action, told CNA that pharmacists “should be horrified” at the effort to “co-opt their businesses into the abortion network.”
“The abortion lobby’s interest in expanding the number of people risking women’s lives and ending the lives of babies in the womb knows no limits,” she said. “Death is their intention.”
Beth Rivin, the president and CEO of Uplift International, said this week that research “confirms that medication abortion can be prescribed through telehealth just as safely as in person.” Hamrick disputed the claim.
“Without proper screening for blood type or by ultrasound, women’s lives and future fertility are at risk,” she said. “Without in-person verification, abusers can get chemical abortion pills to use against women without their knowledge or consent. Pharmacists are not set up for that.”
She also raised the possibility of “future pharmacists who are working to distribute life-affirming care and instead may be forced to deliberately end precious lives.”
Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician and the vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, told CNA that “pharmacists, who do not receive clinical training, should not be distributing these dangerous drugs.”
“By pushing these medically unsupervised abortions, the FDA and abortion advocates continue down the slippery slope of chipping away at medical standards for women seeking abortion,” she said. “This is not health care.”
The effort comes as lawmakers have been pushing to restrict abortion, including abortion pills, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s repeal in June 2022.
Many states restrict the use of abortion pills, specifically the first drug in the two-drug regimen, mifepristone.
Several states have banned the pills entirely while others have passed restrictions on abortion pills designed to protect women, including requirements that only physicians may dispense them. The pills are broadly available in 21 states.
The Supreme Court last June unanimously ruled against a physician-led challenge to the drugs, rejecting an attempt by advocates to impose stricter regulations by claiming that they lacked standing to bring the suit.
Three states picked up the lawsuit in October, arguing that “women should have the in-person care of a doctor when taking high-risk drugs.” The lawsuit said abortion drugs were “flooding” the plaintiff state and “sending women … to the emergency room.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against an abortionist in New York in December, alleging that she illegally provided abortion drugs to a woman in Texas, which killed the unborn child and caused serious health complications for the mother.
Hamrick said the pharmacy initiative raises numerous risks, including dangers to women’s lives and future fertility.
“This is a terrible idea that benefits only the industry profiting from pill pushing,” she said.
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