Alaska Bill Would Let Pharmacists Hand Out Abortion Pills

On Friday (May 9) at 1:30 p.m., the Alaska Senate Labor and Commerce Committee will hear invited testimony for a bill (SB 147) that opens up the ability for pharmacists to prescribe and dispense abortion pills. Although there may be some merit to giving pharmacists greater freedom to assist patients without engaging physicians, the bill needs to clarify with certainty that doesn’t include chemical abortion medication.

CLICK HERE to send a quick email to the Committee asking them to amend SB 147 to clarify that pharmacists should not be able to prescribe and dispense abortion pills.

Senator Cathy Giessel, the bill’s sponsor, has argued that pharmacists are already prohibited from prescribing and dispensing abortion medication under current Alaska statute but that is likely incorrect. Chemical abortions are considered a prescribed medication and not a procedure. The current language of the bill is written to amend the term “patient care services” to include the “prescription or administration of a drug or device to a patient…”

See more info from a 2023 Press Release from Attorney General Treg Taylor regarding Alaska law and chemical abortions.

This bill comes on the heels of a critical study using insurance data that reveals more than 1 in 10 women who take the abortion pill experience serious complications including hemorrhaging, infection, and sepsis—a statistic significantly higher than what the FDA has disclosed to the public.

This study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center analyzed data from over 865,000 prescribed mifepristone abortions, and found that the actual complication rate stands at 10.93%, which is 22 times higher than the “less than 0.5%” figure reported in FDA-approved clinical trials.

How many women from Alaska were told mifepristone abortions were safe but ended up with serious complications? In fact, if we apply the 10.93% complication rate to Alaska’s number of women who had chemical abortions (56% of 1,222), we could estimate that 75 women had some sort of complication. That doesn’t reflect a “safe” abortion method. And in every case, an innocent, unborn Alaskan perished.

TAKING ACTION

— CLICK HERE to send a quick email to the Committee asking them to amend SB 147 to clarify that pharmacists should not be able to prescribe and dispense abortion pills.

— Click here to call your local Legislative Information Office to testify on SB 147 during the Friday, May 9, public hearing, which begins at 1:30 p.m.

LifeNews Note: A lifelong Alaskan, Jim Minnery has served as the executive director of Alaska Family Council since its inception in 2006. He is also a board member for LifeWise Academy, Anchorage.

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