Dishonest abortion activists sidestepped the will of the Ohio Legislature last week, overriding the red state’s laws with Issue 1’s radical protections for abortion. But California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a different tactic for forcing unwanted abortions on red states.
Recently, Newsom signed into law what are supposedly protections for California-based doctors and pharmacists who break other states’ laws by distributing chemical abortion pills. This regimen for death includes two drugs: mifepristone (which blocks the hormone progesterone to kill the preborn baby) and misoprostol (which induces contractions to flush the child out of the woman).
When chemical abortion pills are advertised online and sent through the mail without testing, women become distanced from life-saving care and consultation as they are exposed to the risk of injury, infertility, or death from these dangerous drugs. Abusers can easily take advantage of the abortion-by-mail process to keep their victims from help.
Despite clear risks for women, California is actively seeking to extend its serial murdering spree into states that do have protective measures in place, via pharmacists filling online orders for abortion pills. Newsom assures these pharmacists the state will protect them should legal action arise.
Yet pharmacists should beware: The state of California is attempting to set a dangerous precedent.
Take this plausible scenario for an example: A pharmacist in California mails abortion drugs to a state where they are illegal. The patient on the receiving end of this transaction was never physically examined by a physician (and certainly not by the person prescribing the pills) — a perilous practice that is gaining traction. Tragically, such a lack of oversight leads to the patient experiencing complications, and her life, along with her preborn child’s, is ended.
The laws governing the dispensing of chemical abortion pills are clear and unequivocal in this late patient’s state, and now the California pharmacist who prescribed the drugs faces charges of negligent homicide.
Can you really see a scenario in which a skillful lawyer stops pursuing these charges simply because California wants to claim that its laws hold “more weight” than those of another state?
Consider also the recent, heartbreaking case in Nevada where CVS pharmacists accidentally gave a woman who was undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) pills that caused a direct abortion, killing her twin preborn children. Timika Thomas was supposed to be picking up medication that would support the two lives growing inside her, yet instead experienced “extreme pain” both mentally and physically after taking the wrongfully given drugs.
An investigation found that a series of mistakes led to the disaster. According to a report on the incident, one clinical technician entered the wrong drug name into the prescription, incorrectly thinking she knew the generic name for the brand-name drug prescribed by Thomas’ doctor. One pharmacist also did not catch the error, and when Thomas came to pick up her medication, another pharmacist failed to follow protocol and counsel her on the pills as it was her first time receiving the drug.
Will California ensure that when mistakes like this are made, the pharmacist experiences no legal repercussions or loss of license?
For pharmacists like me, this chilling scenario raises fundamental questions about the responsibility that comes with our professional roles. We are bound by our ethical duty to protect life and adhere to the laws set forth at the federal, state, and local levels, but California has placed pharmacists in an impossible position where no one wins.
This shouldn’t be a game of “pharmacy roulette” where one patient receives potentially life-sustaining or saving medications while the next is given medications that will kill her preborn baby and could kill her. Medical professionals are stewards of life and accountable for our own actions — yet Newsom’s reckless extension of abortion access not only endangers preborn children and women but also places those in my field in a perilous legal and ethical predicament.
To protect pharmacists, women, and preborn children nationwide, Students for Life of America launched a month-long “Halt Pharmacy Abortions” campaign last week to encourage national chains as well as local pharmacies to stay out of the death-distributing business.
California pharmacists and those nationwide, don’t fall for this trick by the abortion lobby and their political friends. Your license and other people’s lives are at stake.
