Dem
51
GOP
49
Abortion activists on both sides are aware that the number of medical abortions has already passed the number of surgical abortions and the trend is for more of them. Now that the FDA has allowed retail pharmacies to stock and dispense mifepristone (albeit after the pharmacy has gotten certified for it). the abortion wars are coming to a pharmacy near you.
As we note above, anti-abortion activists do not generally like prosecuting women who take abortifacient pills. So, as an alternative, they are going after the pharmacies that distribute the pills. Anti-abortion activists are starting to picket CVS and Walgreens pharmacies in an effort to: (1) frighten away women who are going there to buy abortifacient pills and (2) intimidate the stores into no longer stocking abortifacients in order to get rid of the picket lines. However, if the picketeers are on private property (and the parking lot at a mall is most likely private property), in some jurisdictions the store can ask the police to arrest them for trespass.
The pharmacies are in a bind, of course. If they stock mifepristone, they may get picketed. But if they don't, they may also get picketed, just by different people. The drug is relatively pricy (typically, $75), so there is some economic incentive to sell it, and in some cases it may be covered by health insurance. It is, after all, a medicine prescribed by a doctor and many insurance policies cover medicines prescribed by doctors.
Caroline Smith, a leader of the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, is fairly explicit about her group's goals: "We want people to be uncomfortable going into a CVS that has a demonstration going on and to consider going to a different pharmacy." The goal here is to pressure both consumers and store management.
But there is another piece of the puzzle. Some states are passing (or have already passed) laws that ban the sale of the drug or at least give pharmacists who object to it the right to refuse to dispense it. The latter might not work in a large CVS or Walgreens with multiple pharmacists, one of whom was willing to dispense the drug, but could effectively ban it in a small independent pharmacy with one pharmacist. In small towns in rural areas, small pharmacies are much more common than big chain pharmacies, and are probably more willing to bow to anti-abortion protesters.
A major complication here is that mifepristone has medical uses aside from inducing abortions. If state bans on legal products survive court challenges, that opens the door to blue states banning other legal products. For example, cigarettes. Or maybe bullets. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, but says nothing about stores having the right to sell ammo. Having states ban legal products opens a real can of worms.
Some pro-choice groups are arguing that the FDA should drop all its extra certification requirements and simply say that mifepristone should be treated like any other medication. This is especially so since it is extremely safe and drugs with a much greater risk of complications can be dispensed by any licensed pharmacy without any special certification needed.
In any event, the abortion wars will continue for the foreseeable future. Sort of like the Eighty Years' War in Europe in the 16th century. (V)