GOP Officials Urge Pharmacies To Rebuff New York’s Call To Sell Abortion Pills

 Major pharmacies were urged on Monday by 17 Republican state financial officers to disregard calls from New York officials to start offering the widely-used abortion drug mifepristone for sale.

In letters to the CEOs of Costco, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, and McKesson, the Republican officials said that selling mifepristone would be a bad business decision that would alienate customers. They argued that the pharmacies would be wading into political activism if they started offering mifepristone, which is used in more than half of all abortions. 

“This radical position ignores all of the business decisions that go into whether to sell a particular product — decisions that should be made by Albertsons’ leadership based on how it will serve their customers. Your competitor, Costco, also recently admitted that there was no material demand for the drug,” they wrote in a letter to Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran.

The letters come after NYC Comptroller Brad Lander urged the retailers in July to move to offer mifepristone for sale or risk losing consumer confidence. Lander noted that NYC pension funds have about $1.3 billion in ownership in the retailers.

“Companies do best when they provide excellent goods and services to their customers, not when they adopt divisive stances on contentious political issues. We are calling on Albertsons to fulfill that purpose and to ignore activist efforts like the New York City Comptrollers,’” the financial officers wrote. 

The letter was signed by the financial officers of Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. 

“As public officials who oversee various aspects of the financial interests of our own states, state employees, and citizens whom we represent, we find these actions to be inappropriate,” they wrote. “Pushing political issues onto companies harms business, weakens investor fiduciary standards, and is detrimental to the ultimate beneficiaries who depend on strong economic results for their retirement.”

 

Last month, Christian and conservative investors issued a similar call for the pharmacies to rebuff Lander’s recommendations.

Mifepristone has been increasingly used for abortions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, especially in conservative states with strong pro-life protections where abortion has largely been banned. 

A Daily Wire investigation earlier this year found that a network of Left-wing activist groups are flooding red states with abortion pills. People can ​​circumvent state laws with access to the internet, a willingness to make payments online, and a shipping address.