Costco Won’t Carry Abortion Pills—Here’s Why
8.14.25
Click to skip ahead: Costco Caves on abortion pills, agreeing not to carry the medication in their pharmacies. Anti-Abortion Strategy looks at how Virginia Republicans are stoking a moral panic over ‘school funded abortions’. Stats & Studies highlights a new report showing that healthcare providers aren’t confident about how to help teens access abortion. In the States has news from Kansas, Texas, Missouri, and Alabama. In the Nation, veterans say the Trump administration is treating them like “guinea pigs” for a national abortion ban, and keeping an eye on the rise of MAHA.
Costco Caves
Just awful: Bloomberg reports that Costco has caved to anti-abortion activists, agreeing not to carry or dispense abortion pills at its 500 pharmacies across the country.
Costco claims the decision was made because they haven’t seen demand for the pills, and didn’t comment on the long-standing anti-abortion campaign targeting the company. Conservative groups, however, made it very clear that this was their doing.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal group responsible for the end of Roe, said in a release that they were “honored to work alongside the many like-minded partners who made this moment possible.” Students for Life also took a victory lap, crediting their “Halt Pharmacy Abortions” campaign.
Abortion, Every Day has been tracking this campaign for a while now: led by the American Family Association, anti-abortion groups have been pressuring not just Costco—but Walmart, Kroger, and other pharmacy chains. (Despite conservatives’ best efforts, CVS and Walgreens have already agreed to dispense mifepristone.)
The Bigger Picture: This is not about “selling” abortion pills—this is about a company proactively refusing to carry a legal medication. Are there any other safe and effective medications that Costco refuses to carry? I doubt it.
It’s also vital to understand that this will never stop at abortion pills. The groups who launched this campaign insist that emergency contraception, for example, is an abortifacient. How long do you think it will be before Costco pulls the morning-after pill from its shelves? When will they stop carrying hormonal birth control at their pharmacies?
Targeting pharmacies is just another way for Republicans to enact a back door ban: If they can’t make the pills illegal, they’ll make them impossible to get. And remember—this is happening while those same anti-abortion groups are pushing laws that would let pharmacists and other providers refuse to dispense medication or give treatment if it conflicts with their personal beliefs.
Take Action: Now, corporations are not going to save us from our post-Dobbs hellscape. But it’s worth reminding companies like Costco—and other pharmacy giants who might be considering caving—that Americans support abortion.
Besides, supporting abortion access isn’t just the moral thing to do, but good business: Employees don’t want to work in states where they’d lose abortion rights, demand for abortion pills is high, and abortion is popular—far, far more popular than right-wing, Christian fundamentalist investment firms.
If you have a Costco membership, consider canceling it and tell them why. Their website has a customer service chat function, or you can contact member services at 1-800-774-2678, or the pharmacy at 1-800-607-6861.
We’re also working on getting the contact information for everyone on the board of directors, but here are their names in the meantime.
Anti-Abortion Strategy
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has ordered state police to launch a criminal investigation into possible “school-funded abortions” in Fairfax County. If that sounds extremely fucking unlikely, you’re right!
Youngkin, an anti-abortion extremist who’s twice vetoed bills to protect birth control, made the announcement in response to dubious right-wing media reports that a school social worker took two teens to get abortions without parental permission in 2021, and paid for their care. (Virginia requires minors to have parental permission or a judicial bypass.)
The ‘reporting’, which has gone viral in conservative social media circles, is spotty at best. For example, the right-wing newsletter making the bulk of these accusations says that students ended their pregnancies at “Fairfax Healthcare Center”—which doesn’t exist! The only health center with that name is a nursing home.
Still, Youngkin’s office insists in a news release that “the school administration may have known this was happening, and that school funding may have been used.” What school funding? We don’t really know—maybe they’re referring to the allegation that a school employee paid for an abortion, and that their salary was therefore public funds?
Regardless, what we’re talking about here is the Republican governor of Virginia using public resources to harass and terrorize a school district over what amounts to four-year-old gossip. And we have a pretty good idea of why he’s doing it.
This isn’t just run-of-the-mill political theater. Virginia abortion rights activists are working to pass a pro-choice ballot measure, Republicans are desperate to stop it, and there’s one go-to talking point conservatives love best: the lie that codifying abortion rights will eliminate parental consent.
We’ve seen that message in every single state that’s considered a pro-choice measure! What better way to pave the road for Republicans’ anti-abortion messaging on parental consent than to drum up an outrageous story about “school-funded abortions”?
We’ll keep you updated as we find out more, but just remember that we’ve seen similar moral panics about teachers and abortion erupt in other states—chances are this story will end in the same way.
Stats & Studies
One of the reasons Republicans spend so much time talking about teenagers and attacking minors’ right to abortion is that it works. All of their scare-tactic messaging has been seeded in the culture, and now a new study shows that health care professionals are unsure about how to help underage patients access abortion.
Published in Contraception, the study found that less than half of clinicians feel confident helping teens navigate the logistics of obtaining an abortion—especially in states with bans.
“Adolescents rely on us to help them navigate the many hoops they have to jump through to get an abortion,” said pediatrician and lead author Dr. Amanda Bryson. Those hoops don’t just include gestational limits, costs, and logistics—but hurdles specific to teens, like parental involvement laws, and judicial bypasses.
The patchwork landscape of abortion rights is confusing for attorneys and health professionals to sort through—imagine how hard it is for minors navigating unwanted pregnancies. One in five adolescents don’t know where to get an abortion, teens often don’t know who they can turn to for help—and GOP lawmakers across the country are trying to make it a crime for adults to help them!
It’s a perfect storm to deny minors even basic agency over their bodies.
“It’s our responsibility to step up during this crisis, and we must do everything in our power to support adolescents' autonomy in making their own reproductive health decisions,” Dr. Bryson says.
In the States
A Kansas clinic is suing for the right to allow advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) to provide abortions—a move to help meet the massive influx of out-of-state patients. Aria Medical Clinic, like most abortion providers in pro-choice states, is struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing demand; increasing the pool of providers would make a tremendous difference.
And though Kansas lawmakers recently passed legislation expanding the kinds of services APRNs can provide—they included specific exceptions for abortion.The ACLU criticized these obviously-discriminatory rules, pointing out that APRNs are qualified to prescribe medication abortion and provide in-clinic abortions.
The clinic is suing the state nursing board, the board's president, Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett. From the suit:
"Being able to hire or contract with APRNs to prescribe abortion medication would allow Aria Medical to keep up with the demand, better meet the needs of its patients, and uphold its commitment to providing compassionate care with short wait times.”
State leaders are trying to dismiss the case, claiming the clinic lacks standing. Whatever the outcome, this is a good reminder that pro-choice states need to more than just make abortion legal: they need to expand access, including by expanding the scope of who’s allowed to provide care.
All eyes are on Texas right now, where state House Democrats have fled the state to block Republicans’ attempt to force Congressional redistricting and steal virtually all House seats. But that’s not all: Please remember that Republicans are advancing the so-called “Woman and Child Protection Act” in this special session—the anti-abortion monstrosity that they weren’t able to pass last time around.
SB 6 (formerly SB 2880) would allow private citizens to file bank-breaking civil lawsuits against anyone who manufactures or ships abortion pills into Texas. And that’s just what Republicans admit the bill would do! The legislation could also revive a century-old abortion ban that would allow for the prosecution of abortion patients and anyone who helps them:
Abortion, Every Day has been tracking this Texas GOP strategy for a while now: they tried to sneak it in to a different bill first—one they claimed would allow for more abortion ban ‘exceptions.’ When that didn’t work out (thanks in part to our reporting) they moved on to the next bill. At the end of the day, Republicans are trying to hand-deliver a massive expansion of power to Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Here’s the good news, bad news: The Texas Senate passed SB 6 on Tuesday, but The Texan notes that unless the state House returns to quorum by Friday (and it can’t, until House Democrats return), the bill will die…again.
A small positive update from Missouri: The state Supreme Court just denied Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s request to reinstate the state’s total abortion ban for clerical reasons. The justices ruled unanimously that Bailey’s request should have gone to the appeals court first, rather than sent directly to the state Supreme Court.
This is just Bailey’s latest attempt to overturn the will of the people—who made it pretty damn clear they want abortion to be legal when they passed pro-choice ballot measure, Amendment 3.
But it’s not just Bailey undermining democracy: Missouri Republicans are putting abortion back on the ballot, proposing an amendment that codify a state ban. And because they know voters in the state are pro-choice, Republicans are calling the measure ‘Amendment 3’, and using language that sounds as if they’re protecting abortion rights.
It’s a pretty transparent move to trick Missourians into supporting a ban—one that’s par for the Republican course.
Some positive news: Alabama’s WAWC Healthcare (formerly West Alabama Women’s Center) has added a new physician, as of this week. The clinic sees roughly 200 patients a month, offering a range of reproductive and sexual health care, prenatal care, and doula support. WAWC’s two midwives include the only Black midwife practicing in western Alabama. Donate to WAWC here.
Quick hits:
An appeals court has upheld the dismissal of the Satanic Temple’s lawsuit against Idaho over the state’s abortion ban;
The Salt Lake Tribune profiles Shireen Ghorbani, the new head of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah;
And the Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld the state’s abortion ban. We’ll do a deeper dive on this decision next week, because there’s something telling in there that hints at Republicans’ broader plans for doing away with exceptions for women’s lives.
Last year, Aid Access shipped 118,000 packs of abortion pills into America.
84% of them went to patients in states with bans.
In the Nation
In The Intercept this week, veterans say that the Trump administration is using them as “guinea pigs” for a national abortion ban. Remember, the Department of Veterans Affairs just proposed a rule change that would eliminate abortion access for veterans and their beneficiaries who’ve been raped or have dangerous pregnancies.
And this isn’t just a rule for anti-abortion states: it would apply to veterans across the country, regardless of a state’s abortion laws.
“It feels like being spit in my face,” Ash Wallis says. “I wrote a check up to and including my life for this country, and I’m not provided equal access to care.”
And Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America, reminds The Intercept that the policy is particularly cruel considering that the military is rife with sexual violence. “Now, if you get raped and become pregnant,” she says, “they won’t help you.”
Take Action: The Center for Reproductive Rights flags that the VA’s proposed rule hasn’t been finalized yet and is open for public comment. You can submit a comment here.
If you haven’t read this POLITICO piece about how MAHA bullshit is catching fire all over the country, make sure to check it out. It’s a good reminder for why anti-abortion activists are honing in so specifically on the lie that fetal remains and abortion medication is ‘poisoning the groundwater’. They see which way the wind is blowing. For more on that strategy, read here and here.
Quick hits:
The Guardian reports on new research showing that Trump’s efforts to defund Planned Parenthood threaten the U.S. healthcare system;
The National Women’s Law Center has a brief explainer on ‘pro-natalists’;
And Ms. has republished a UNFPA explainer on how contraception is not abortion. (Can’t believe we have to reiterate that, but here we are.)
I will let Costco know exactly what I think, but let this be another lesson for us all in corporatism. All mom and pop neighborhood pharmacies have disappeared and the power lies in the hands of a few corporations with little to no connection or care for the communities and people they serve.
I've been a member of Costco for over ten years now.
I get all my prescriptions and eye care from them. They were a godsend when I had eye surgery two years ago and a dental implant before that.
As a Medicare patient it's important to find a good pharmacy that will honor your Part D benefits without a lot of hassle and that's why I chose Costco. They're in network with Cigna, who is my Part D carrier.
I will be in touch with Costco today and tell them I'll be looking for a pharmacy to partner with Cigna that doesn't play possum with right wing religious pressure groups.
Costco needs to be boycotted. I live near Puyallup, Washington and would love to hear from people in that area who could join me in picketing them.
Washington is supposed to be a solid prochoice state. Now I understand why the state has been stockpiling RU486.
And if anyone wants to give me crap about being a senior citizen I'll tell them you won't have the freedom I knew as a Boomer woman if you don't fight back against this bullshit!