Pro-life college students are planning protests this winter against major pharmacy chains like Walgreens and CVS that recently agreed to begin selling abortion drugs.
Students for Life, which is organizing the protests with other pro-life groups, has the first major demonstration planned for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, at the Walgreens National Headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois.
“Our purpose of having these protests is so that we can let ‘Big Pharma’ companies know that it’s absolutely unacceptable to offer abortion at our neighborhood drug stores,” Caroline Wharton, a writer and press strategist with Students for Life, told the Catholic News Agency.
Earlier this month, Walgreens, CVS and RiteAid announced plans to begin selling abortion drugs that are used to kill unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Their decisions come after the Biden administration decided to allow pharmacies to sell the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone, which has killed millions of babies and dozens of women, and injured thousands more. Previously, mifepristone only could be dispensed by abortion facilities, medical offices and hospitals or under the supervision of a licensed physician.
ACTION ALERT: Contact Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid and tell them to stop selling the abortion pill.
Pro-life organizations are urging Americans to boycott the pharmacy chains.
Students for Life primarily focuses on pro-life students, but the organization welcomes all pro-lifers to participate in the up-coming protests. Most will take place March 4 at local pharmacies across the country in a National Day of Protest to “Cancel Abortion Cartels.”
Wharton told CNA that students want to “let these CEOs know that they need to go back on this decision. They do not need to certify this program with the FDA and they should not be distributing these life-ending drugs.”
“I don’t want to go into a drugstore and be able to buy my chewing gum and my tights and then get a pill that ends a life. It’s just not acceptable,” she continued.
Here’s more from the report:
40 Days for Life, a longtime organizer of peaceful prayer and pro-life outreach campaigns at abortion clinics, will encourage protests at pharmacies during its upcoming Feb. 22-April 2 campaign.
“CVS and Walgreens have replaced Planned Parenthood as the most significant abortion chains in the Western Hemisphere,” Shawn Carney, president and CEO of 40 Days for Life, told CNA Jan. 24. “With 18,000 locations between the two, and now Rite Aid joining in, we have given the hundreds of 40 Days for Life campaign leaders not currently leading a campaign the opportunity to do so outside a pharmacy.”
Last week, Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins urged students to speak out against the pharmacies’ decision during her address to the National Pro-Life Summit.
“Thanks to President Biden’s weaponization of the once-admired Food & Drug Administration, the next time you are at a CVS or Walgreens picking up cold medicine or tampons (because we ladies, only, have the gift of fertility), the abuser in front of you may be picking up the pills to force feed his next victim,” Hawkins said. “Or the young girl behind you may be seconds away from ingesting a pill that will kill her baby and perhaps her.”
She said abortion pills kill unborn babies with beating hearts and risk the health and well-being of their mothers, and urged students to persevere in the fight for life.
“With Roe gone, America has a real chance to become truly, the land of the free, the free to be born,” Hawkins said. “But now, it’s our responsibility to bring the brave. To be unstoppable. To see good triumph over evil. And to end the devastation of abortion in our nation, forever.”
The drug mifepristone, typically used with a second drug, misoprostol, now is used to abort more than half of all unborn babies in the U.S. every year, or nearly half a million, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The FDA also has linked mifepristone to at least 28 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications between 2000 and 2018. However, under President Barack Obama, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported. So the numbers almost certainly are much higher.
Studies indicate the risks are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment. A recent study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that the rate of abortion-related emergency room visits by women taking the abortion drug increased more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015.
Another new study from the University of Toronto, “Short-Term Adverse Outcomes After Mifepristone–Misoprostol Versus Procedural Induced Abortion,” published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that one in ten women who took the abortion pill had to go to the emergency room, according to Pregnancy Help News.
ACTION ALERT: Contact Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid and tell them to stop selling the abortion pill.
