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.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
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.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
6 Comments
Senator Cathy Giessel, the bill’s sponsor,
There she goes again, one of many reasons to get rid vote her out of office.
Cathy Giessel, the Bill’s sponsor is not to be trusted. She is one of the “gang of seven” who are unprincipled and rude. Do not trust her. She does not represent her constituents but her own selfish ambitions. She does not follow the rules for the legislature. She just wants her way. And now she wants to tax us besides putting a bill forward that allows chemical abortions. Cathy is not learning…We are her boss. She is not our boss. She is taking power that does not belong to her. Her value system is broken and creates chaos as one of the “gang of seven!!” Do not turn your back on her. Pray for our state and our country.
AMEN! Thank you for your statement. I pray her district is listening!
MEANWHILE: The Trump administration on Monday asked a judge to toss out a lawsuit from three GOP-led states seeking to cut off telehealth access to abortion medication mifepristone. Anyone with half a brain knows that abortion has never been that much of an issue for Trump. Sure, he pays lip service to the issue for evangelical support, but he also knows that if medication abortions during the first trimest are prohibited, it would hurt the GOP even more in the midterms.
You can’t go wrong by never believing Trump’s words. Just today after he mocked the Catholic Church with his photo of Trump as pope and every Catholic everywhere expressed disgust and disapproval, he said the Catholics loved it.
When are you people who devolve so quickly into party lines and religiosity, going to wake up? I challenge you to conduct an experiment and select a news aggregate station online from each “Side” and listen to them both everyday. When the moments come you realize that you watched the same story on both sides but they were presented completely different, with opposite meaning details of a story for the same event, you will start watching for it.