Credit: Fox News
Twenty Republican attorneys general are sending a message, loud and clear, to Walgreens and CVS.
They say the companies could be liable if they continue to use the mail to ship abortion medication after a recent Food and Drug Administration rule change that expanded access to those drugs.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey led the coalition of AGs and said that his office would do everything in its power to warn these companies that they would use “every tool at our disposal to uphold the law.”
“As Attorney General, it is my responsibility to enforce the laws as written, and that includes enforcing the very laws that protect Missouri’s women and unborn children,” Bailey said in a statement.
“[M[any people are not aware that federal law expressly prohibits using the mail to send or receive any drug that will ‘be used or applied for producing abortion,'” the AGs warned in letters sent to the companies on Wednesday.
“Although many people are unfamiliar with this statute because it has not been amended in a few decades, the text could not be clearer: ‘every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion … shall not be conveyed in the mails.’ And anyone who ‘knowingly takes any such thing from the mails for the purpose of circulating’ is guilty of a federal crime,” they wrote.
CVS and Walgreens announced their intentions after the Biden administration developed a plan in early January to change an FDA rule that would now allow companies like CVS and Walgreens to apply for a certificate to distribute a two-step abortion-inducing drug.
Before this rule change, mifepristone, the first pill in the two-part abortion process, could be dispensed only by some mail-order pharmacies or a certified doctor or clinic.
However, the AGs are warning that the change is an incorrect reading of what the law allows.
“We reject the Biden administration’s bizarre interpretation, and we expect courts will as well. Courts do not lightly ignore the plain text of statutes. And the Supreme Court has been openly aversive to other attempts by the Biden administration to press antitextual arguments,” they wrote.
“A future U.S. Attorney General will almost certainly reject the Biden administration’s results-oriented, strained reading. And consequences for accepting the Biden administration’s reading could come far sooner,” the letters said.
The AGs also note that abortion pills are “far riskier than surgical abortions”.
They cite a recent American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists study that says chemical abortions were 5.96 times as likely to result in complications as first-trimester aspiration abortions.
“Abortion pills carry the added risk that when these heightened complications invariably occur, women suffer those harms at home, away from medical help,” the AGs wrote.
“We emphasize that it is our responsibility as State Attorneys General to uphold the law and protect the health, safety, and well-being of women and unborn children in our states. Part of that responsibility includes ensuring that companies like yours are fully informed of the law so that harm does not come to our citizens,” the AGs wrote.
The letter is signed by AGs Steven Marshall of Alabama, Treg Taylor of Alaska, Tim Griffin of Arkansas, Ashley Moody of Florida, Chris Carr of Georgia, Todd Rokita of Indiana, Breanna General of Iowa, Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, Lynn Fitch of Mississippi, Drew Wrigley of North Dakota, David Yost of Ohio, Grenter F. Drummond of Oklahoma, Alan Wilson of South Carolina, Marty Jackley of South Dakota, Ken Paxton of Texas and Sean Reyes of Utah.
