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(LifeSiteNews) – Pharmaceutical chain Walgreens has confirmed it will not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion itself is legal but Republican attorneys general have warned that distributing abortion pills via the mail is not.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, allowing states to directly ban abortion and reactivating numerous old abortion laws, the abortion lobby and its Democrat allies have been scrambling to enact a number of strategies to preserve abortion “access” across state lines, with interstate distribution of abortion pills being one of the chief methods to emerge.

Among those moves was the FDA eliminating the requirement that abortion pills only be dispensed in-person to the women taking them, and the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declaring that abortion pills may be freely mailed across the country, despite the fact that a provision of a 150-year-old law called the Comstock Act that expressly says the opposite.

Shortly after the FDA updated its website to reflect the new guidelines allowing retail pharmacies to carry mifepristone, pending the completion of an agreement form, Walgreens and pharmacy chain CVS announced that they would fill out the form, prompting 20 Republican attorneys general to sign letters to the companies warning them that doing so would be in violation of federal law and that they were opening themselves to potential penalties.

In response, Walgreens previously notified Kansas that it would comply within the state, and now the company has confirmed to every signatory that it will not dispense the pills in any of their states, Politico reports. “There is currently complexity around this issue in Kansas and elsewhere,” said Walgreens senior director of external relations Fraser Engerman.

However, it added that while it has not yet begun dispensing abortion pills anywhere in the country, Walgreens does intend to eventually do so in states that have not disputed the Biden guidance. The company told CBS News that it plans to “become a certified pharmacy under the program, however we will only dispense in those jurisdictions where it is legal to do if we are certified.”

A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-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.”

Pro-lifers warn that with the Biden administration completely eliminating requirements that abortion pills be taken under any medical supervision or with medical support close by, those events are certain to increase. 

Yet the White House and the abortion lobby have determined that, with the overturn of Roe restoring states’ ability to decide their own abortion laws, easy distribution of abortion pills will be one of their chief methods of preserving abortion “access.” In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 has led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, but the chemical abortion business has “surged,” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol.

Walgreens’ latest statement “indicates that pro-life concerns are being heard and that corporations are not rushing to take over the abortion business but are proceeding cautiously,” said Students for Life spokesperson Kristi Hamrick.

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