(LifeSiteNews) — Pro-abortion activists are mulling convenience stores as a way to expand access to morning after pills to counteract pro-life state laws, according to a new report.
UPI reports that Oakland-based company Cadence OTC, which sells a brand of levonorgestrel (better known as Plan B) named “Morning After Pill,” has partnered with health and beauty product supplier Lil’ Drug Store Products to get their pill in 11,000 locations across 48 states. They are working on selling convenience stores on their product as both profitable and part of a so-called “women’s health” agenda.
“A lot of college campuses and military bases are in remote areas and are filled with young people, so these are priorities for contraceptive access,” Cadence said. “C-stores are in every neighborhood and they are open long hours.”
So-called “urgent healthcare products,” the abortifacient company added, “are a logical expansion space for C-stores, and the profit margins are generally higher than food and soft drinks” and can replace lost revenue from cigarettes as people quit smoking.
“The independent pharmacies are the ones who are not likely to have a gaggle of lawyers on retainer who can tell them, ‘Yes, emergency contraception is fine, they’re not discussed at all in any of the abortion legislation, you guys can keep going with this,’” New Orleans gynecologist Dr. Frank “Will” Williams III said. “They didn’t have that luxury, so when Dobbs came through, that’s where we really saw an absence of access to contraception.”
Progestin-based contraceptives like Plan B are commonly promoted as alternatives to abortion because they supposedly prevent pregnancy rather than end it. In January 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) amended Plan B’s label to “clarify” that it was not an abortifacient. But such drugs do in fact have abortifacient potential, and whether they prevent conception or implantation depends on when they are taken relative to a woman’s cycle.
“If Plan B is taken five to two days before egg release is due to happen, the interference with the LH signal prevents a woman from releasing an egg, no fertilization happens, and no embryo is formed,” Dr. Donna Harrison of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists explains, citing numerous studies. However, if the pill is taken during the “two-day window in which embryos can form but positive pregnancy tests don’t occur,” studies indicate it “has a likely embryocidal effect in stopping pregnancy.”
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents with a variety of tactics, especially the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines, regardless of the risks to the women they are supposedly serving.
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
