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Fourteen concerned citizens answered People for Life's call, this past Saturday, for volunteers to conduct an informational picket / protest demonstration at Wallgreens on the corner of W. 38th and Peach in Erie. The small group included people from Corry, East Springfield, Union City, and Meadville.
We were prepared with signs for as many as 50 volunteers, but the 14 of us were certainly enough to get our point across: Walgreens has gone into the business of dispensing mifepristone abortion pills, and this is entirely unacceptable because abortion kills a human being.
Erie News Now and Jet 24 Action News both covered our effort.
The traffic during our 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. demonstration was intense! It was a perfect time to to be seen by a lot of motorists. Most reactions were positive. One individual rolled down her car window and said she was changing to Tops pharmacy (just a block down the street). Another lady who was on her way into Walgreens also said that she was changing pharmacies.
If you would like to be notified about our Walgreens demonstrations going forward, please let us know. We will put you on our Direct Action email and/or robocall lists.
The demonstrations will almost certainly have to be expanded to include CVS pharmacies, once we get confirmation that CVS has also started trafficking in abortion pills in Pennsylvania.
BACKGROUND (from our press release)
The Walgreens company (Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.) announced on March 1 that it would begin dispensing the abortion drug Mifepristone, and that Pennsylvania was one of five states to be targeted initially. Mifepristone will only be dispensed from a subset of Walgreens pharmacies, and the company has been very clear that it intends (understandably) to keep the locations of those pharmacies a closely-guarded secret. It will probably be some time before anyone will know if the Erie location is a distribution point, if that becomes the case.
Our protests, then, are being directed toward the Walgreens company as a whole, with the Erie location only considered a potential distribution point.
The sale of Mifepristone through local pharmacies, made possible only by abandoning many of the health and safety regulations that were initially applied to the drug, brings the injustice of abortion killing further into the mainstream of everyday life and into the midst of our local communities in a shocking new way. Free-standing abortion facilities, often located in deteriorated urban areas, are bad enough. But, operating an extension of the abortion facilities in mainstream commercial places frequented by hundreds of ordinary shoppers of all ages is even worse.
We are calling on pharmacies such as Walgreens to have nothing to do with the Mifepristone abortion drug. We think that as the public becomes aware of the current situation, many people will prefer to take their business elsewhere.
Mifepristone was developed expressly for the purpose of abortion killing. It was approved in 2000 by the FDA only for carrying out abortions during the first 7 weeks of pregnancy and only after a careful examination including tests for tubal pregnancy, to confirm the age of the unborn child, and for Rh negativity.
Studies suggest that at least 10% of mifepristone abortion patients show up at an emergency room with some concern or complaint. And there is strong evidence to suggest that health care providers are not documenting many such cases as stemming from a drug-induced abortion. The complication rate in a number of European countries is reported to be considerably higher, approximately 20%.
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