Anti-Abortion Groups Are Planning One of Their Dumbest Protests Yet
Activists will camp out in front of Walgreens and CVS locations across America and harass customers over the pharmacies potentially carrying abortion pills.
AbortionPolitics

After the FDA announced last week it would allow retail pharmacies to carry the abortion drug mifepristone behind its counters, CVS and Walgreens said their pharmacies in legal jurisdictions would become certified to distribute mifepristone. This was, uh, obviously an affront to anti-abortion activists who are not letting the foot off the gas after getting the big thing they wanted at the Supreme Court.
Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising—the same group that claimed to have been given 115 sets of fetal remains from a medical waste truck—will be protesting at Walgreens and CVS locations in a range of cities across America on Saturday, Feb. 4. Members are hitting up the obvious sites—New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco—but the organic, protester-led format (think about how satellite versions of the Women’s Marches were held around the country) means they’ll also be protesting at retail pharmacies in Boston, Mass.; Austin, Texas; Detroit, Mich.; Pittsburgh, Penn.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Akron, Ohio; and Portland, Oregon, as of publication.
The group says the protests will have the same vibe as sidewalk “counseling” that anti-abortion activists do in front of abortion clinics to harass providers and patients. “We want people to be uncomfortable going into a CVS that has a demonstration going on and to consider going to a different pharmacy,” Caroline Smith, a Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising leader, told Politico. “We also want to put enough pressure on the companies to retract this decision and not get certified to sell abortion pills.”