SACRAMENTO (LifeSiteNews) — California’s radically pro-abortion Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday announced that his state will stop “doing business” with pharmacy giant Walgreens after the chain announced it wouldn’t dispense abortion drugs in 20 states.
Newsom, who has openly promoted the struggling Golden State as an abortion sanctuary in response to the rollback of Roe v. Wade, and has actively invited women to travel from out of state to kill their babies in California, made the announcement in a Monday tweet.
“California won’t be doing business with [Walgreens] — or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk,” Newsom said, responding to a CNN article reporting on Walgreens’ decision not to sell abortion drugs in the 20 states.
“We’re done,” he declared.
California won’t be doing business with @walgreens — or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk.
We’re done.https://t.co/OB10cYfm8H
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 6, 2023
READ: Walgreens won’t dispense abortion pills in 20 states with pro-life attorneys general
While leftists were quick to praise Newsom for his promise to punish Walgreens for agreeing to abide by pro-life protections in certain states, others pushed back against his full-throated defense of abortion in all its forms.
“This is ghoulish,” reacted Live Action president and founder Lila Rose. “Yet another new low. The salivating over drugs that kill babies is disgusting.”
“Gavin Newsom’s attempt to bully Walgreens into providing abortion drugs in jurisdictions where it might be illegal highlights his prioritization of delivering dead children over live ones,” California Right to Life outreach director Mary Rose Short told LifeSiteNews in an email statement Tuesday.
“In California, Newsom has championed laws that force businesses to fund and facilitate abortion; now he is attempting to bludgeon a business into violating states’ laws that prohibit abortion and protect unborn children and their mothers,” Short continued.
“By now Walgreens should realize that it can never be pro-abortion enough to please today’s Democrat party,” she added. “Newsom expects the pharmacy to provide abortion drugs even where it is illegal, where there is no demand for the regimen, and where there are no pharmacists willing to fill the lethal prescription.”
Abortion drugs work by first cutting off the preborn baby’s access to progesterone, causing his or her death. The follow-up drug induces labor so that the mother delivers the deceased infant. The drugs have also been traced to serious side effects for the mothers themselves, up to and including death.
A Live Action report written in consultation with the American Association of Pro-life OB/GYNS (AAPLOG) noted that, following the FDA’s approval of the mifepristone (Mifeprex) and misoprostol chemical abortion regime, “nearly 4 million preborn children have been killed” through medication abortion.
“There have additionally been 24 reported maternal deaths, and the FDA has received over 4,000 reports of adverse events from women experiencing hemorrhage, excruciating abdominal pain, and severe life-threatening infections,” the report noted.
During the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, Planned Parenthood director turned pro-life advocate Abby Johnson described the harrowing reality of the abortion drugs’ results.
“We’re talking about women going into pharmacies, requesting these very dangerous chemical abortion drugs, going home without any sort of medical supervision, taking these pills not really knowing what’s going to happen to their bodies, not really understanding what’s going to happen inside of their womb,” Johnson said.
“They’re passing these babies into the toilet, fully formed babies – 12, 14, 16 weeks along in their pregnancy – possibly hemorrhaging in their bathroom, unable to get to an emergency care facility, looking in the toilet and seeing their fully formed baby floating there in the toilet,” she said.
Meanwhile, Newsom’s Monday announcement comes as new battle lines are actively being drawn in the pro-life movement in the lead-up and wake of Roe v. Wade’s overthrow last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned the right to regulate abortion back to the states. Chemical abortions have become increasingly popular, and with statewide bans on surgical abortion taking place throughout the U.S., pro-life activists are focusing more attention on legislation to protect preborn babies from the more and more readily accessible abortion drugs.
In December 2021, not long before the landmark Dobbs ruling, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scrapped the requirement that abortion pills only be dispensed in person to the women taking them.
This January, the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declared that abortion pills could be freely mailed across the country.
Following new FDA guidelines, Walgreens and CVS announced that they would file for the ability to dispense the lethal drugs from their stores. However, after receiving warning letters from 20 Republican attorneys general, Walgreens backed off, promising it wouldn’t dispense the drugs in those states.
It remains to be seen how Newsom’s moves against Walgreens will pan out.
The California governor’s decision to wield power against a company whose policies he disagrees with comes even as leftists have attempted to brand Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as an authoritarian “dictator” for using his executive power against Disney over its woke agenda.
Failed former Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried argued last week that DeSantis’ moves to strip Disney of its self-governing status over its Florida property was “based on revenge and being a dictator.”
DeSantis has defended his actions against Disney as being in the interests of the people of Florida, who he said are seeing their values threatened by a leftist, California-based corporation.
“If Disney wants to pick a fight, they chose the wrong guy,” he said. “I will not allow a woke corporation based in California to run our state.”