California will end business with Walgreens over abortion pill stance, Newsom says
California will sever enterprise ties with Walgreens just after the pharmacy giant declared it would not distribute abortion products in various states in which abortion is lawful, Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Monday.
“California will not be undertaking business enterprise with @walgreens — or any business that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at danger,” Newsom wrote. “We’re completed.”
A spokesperson for Newsom, Brandon Richards, said in a statement that “California is examining all relationships concerning Walgreens and the point out.”
Richards declined to make clear what the state’s recent business enterprise with the pharmacy chain is and how it would slice ties.
Walgreens announced final 7 days that it would not provide abortion supplements in many states exactly where abortion continues to be legal, like Alaska, Florida, Iowa and Montana. It had confronted stress from 20 Republican attorneys common, who explained to Walgreens in a letter that it could encounter lawful effects if it bought abortion treatment in all those states, some in which abortion is illegal and some the place it continues to be lawful.
Walgreens did not respond to a request for comment about Newsom’s assertion. It said in assertion Monday, the same working day as Newsom’s, that it “plans to dispense mifepristone in any jurisdiction exactly where it is legally permissible to do so.” Previous week, Fraser Engerman, Walgreens’ senior director of external relations, said the chain was not dispensing mifepristone any place in the place. Engerman extra that Walgreens was in search of Fda certification to sell mifepristone but was navigating a “sophisticated and in-flux area of the law.”
Newsom, a Democrat, has positioned himself as a crusader for abortion rights. Last thirty day period, he led an alliance for Democratic governors to share model laws and probable government orders about safeguarding abortion obtain.
Medicine abortion has become a new battleground for abortion rights, with pharmacies generally caught in the crossfire. It accounted for far more than fifty percent of all U.S. abortions in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advocates for abortion entry. Mifepristone is normally the first drug applied in a two-drug medicine abortion regimen.
“I consider you are going to see serious attempts to target it, to test to choose it off the markets, to ban it in states, as well as efforts to make it extra available,” Rachel Rebouché, the dean of the Temple College Regulation School and an expert in reproductive wellbeing legislation, explained about abortion capsules. “So I imagine this is what will occupy legislators’ and advocates’ consideration in the coming years.”