Pro-life advocates all across America held protests Saturday outside their local CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid pharmacies, urging the companies to cancel their plans to begin selling deadly abortion drugs.
Many stood in the wind and snow and some were targets of hostile counter-protests as they defended unborn babies’ right to life in at least 95 different locations – from Pittsburgh to Chicago, San Francisco to Lansing, Michigan – with the #StopAbortionRx campaign.
“Abortion is not healthcare,” said Herb Geraghty, executive director of Rehumanize International, one of the campaign organizers. “Abortion is violence, and it has no place in our pharmacies or in our community.”
In January, Walgreens, CVS and, later, Rite Aid announced plans to begin selling abortion drugs that are used to kill unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Their decisions came 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. Previously, mifepristone only could be dispensed by FDA-approved abortion facilities, medical offices and hospitals under the direct supervision of a licensed physician.
Since the announcements, pro-life leaders have launched boycotts and protests against the pharmacy chains all across the country.
ACTION ALERT: Contact Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid and let them know you will boycott their stores until they stop selling the abortion pill.
On Saturday, outside a CVS in downtown Pittsburgh, Geraghty said they had a lot of good conversations with people about abortion – despite having to contend with an aggressive group of counter-protesters who showed up with megaphones and umbrellas in an attempt to silence them.
“By far the most important interaction we had was with a man who told us that his son had recently gotten a woman pregnant under very difficult circumstances,” Geraghty told LifeNews. “The man was pro-life but didn’t know about all of the great local resources we have available in Pittsburgh to help this woman and his son. He took our literature to pass on and we are hopeful we will be an advocate for his unborn grandchild who may be at risk.”
Geraghty said they also passed out hats and gloves, hand warmers and gift cards to people in need.
Hundreds of miles away in Michigan, pro-life advocates stood in the snow with signs urging the big businesses to “Keep abortion out of pharmacies” and not to trade “pulses for profit.”
Pro-life advocate Monica Miller helped organize a protest outside a CVS in Livonia, one of nine locations across Michigan, The Detroit News reports. Miller said she hopes the protests and boycotts will prompt the companies to reverse their decision.
“I think it’s reckless and it certainly is an attack on the sacred value of human life when all is said and done. … It normalizes the abortion practice,” she told the newspaper.
Others with the Pro-Life Action League bore the cold to raise awareness on the sidewalks outside a Walgreens in Aurora, Illinois. One woman held a sign that read, “Killing an innocent human life is not healthcare.” Another pro-lifer displayed the image of an unborn baby at seven weeks of pregnancy beside the message, “Life is beautiful.”
Geraghty told LifeNews that many people were not aware of what the abortion drugs do to unborn babies: “… we had a lot of conversations clarifying the differences between the abortion pill and Plan B or the morning after pill. Most of the people we talked to shared that they didn’t really know exactly what happened in early pregnancy and we were able to share information about early human development that definitely came as a surprise to some folks who have likely been told that unborn babies are simply ‘clumps of cells.’”
The abortion drug mifepristone, typically used with a second drug, misoprostol, is used to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy. In recent years, they have been responsible for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., or nearly half a million unborn babies’ deaths a year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 28 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications between 2000 and 2018. Last week, LifeNews broke news about the death of another 19-year-old woman in Canada. Under President Barack Obama, however, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported. So the complication numbers almost certainly are much higher.
Studies indicate the risks of abortion drugs are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment.
More protests against the pharmacies are planned in the coming weeks, including one by Students for Life on Valentine’s Day.
The #StopAbortionRx campaign was a project of PAAU, Live Action, Secular Pro-Life, Democrats for Life of America, The Pro-Life Action League, Rehumanize International and other pro-life organizations.
ACTION ALERT: Contact Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid and let them know you will boycott their stores until they stop selling the abortion pill.
