“Abortion Pills Can Now Be Offered at Retail Pharmacies, F.D.A. Says,” read the New York Times headline. Just like that. This is life after Roe v. Wade.
On Christmas Day, I found myself in the care of a dear Jewish doctor at an urgent care in New York, who was happy to be able to help me on a day that was just another day to him. He gave me two prescriptions to help with what turned out to be a sinus infection. I walked around the block to a small-business pharmacy that was open for a few hours that day, and the woman who helped me couldn’t have been more compassionate. Even in this relatively small malady, she wanted me to get better.
That pharmacy happens to specialize in fertility. It’s an integrative health kind of place, which means it is countercultural for medicine. It tenderly combats the scandal of women’s health — protocols that don’t solve women’s health problems but masks them. That’s why so many young girls are prescribed the contraceptive pill for menstrual irregularity — let’s make things look better rather than get to the cause of the problem. Aside from moral questions, that carcinogen may just cause more medical problems for her, including infertility when the time comes that she might want to have children.
Of course, that seems quite a quaint problem when we now have a high-ranking official in the Department of Health and Human Services who is a medical doctor who chooses to identify as a woman and advocate for children to make such choices decades earlier than he did.
And, too, now with the end of Roe, the priority for the FDA and others is to make sure abortion is as accessible as possible. There are international mail-order options trying to override decisions in states in the United States that now protect unborn life because they now can. And in states like my own, where abortion is the priority for our Catholic University of America Law School graduate governor, you will soon be in line for your cough or heart or other medicine that is meant to help heal with a scared young girl getting her abortion pills. (And there is also the mail option.) She will take them home and be alone with her blood and the blood of her dead baby.
If you haven’t seen the movie “Unplanned,” see it. If you have already, watch it in our post-Roe reality. It provides an image that you cannot unsee about what chemical abortion is. CVS and Walgreens dispensing abortion pills means a grave bloody mess for women and girls who go there to get their prescriptions.
We’re such a long way from the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.
In 2022, Vicki Thorne died. Not a household name, but she should be. She was a trailblazer in post-abortion healing, founding Project Rachel. Named after the mother in the Old Testament whose lamentations for her dead children could not be consoled, Thorne lived to make her cry be heard. She wept with women who had abortions and walked with them in prayer and counsel for healing. The pain of a woman who has had abortion is real. Our post-Roe culture wants to pretend it is nothing. It wants to convince us that taking pills in your bathroom and seeing the bloody remains of your child in your toilet — and maybe beyond — is empowerment.
That’s a lie.
Abortions are being prevented in some states in America now that Roe has ended. There are women and girls relieved that the law doesn’t expect them to have abortions like it did before the end of June. But the push remains to insist that it is routine to end the life of an unborn child — that it’s not any different than getting your anxiety prescription filled.
I’m probably not alone in using CVS because it is convenient. Reorder on the app and all. We should rethink that with their seemingly easy decision to dispense abortion pills. Our little decisions have consequences. Let’s consciously try to not be a part of the culture of death, as we find more bold and creative ways to reach out to the women and girls in our lives to make a culture of life and civilization of love real for them.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review.
