Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Where can we buy prescription drugs in the United States?
From a pharmacy.
What are the two largest pharmacies in the United States?
CVS and Walgreens, by far.
What happens when CVS and Walgreens are closed for business?
Immediately, close to 50% of Americans will have to find another place to shop. Assuming there is another place if those two giants are shut down.
Who wants to protest those two drugstore giants and many others in an attempt to send shoppers elsewhere?
Aha, that is the question.
A story in Politico this past week was headlined: “Next frontier in the abortion wars: Your local CVS.”
The story reported a planned boycott of CVS and Walgreens next month by anti-abortion activists because those companies are planning to stock and sell the abortion pill in states where abortions are still legal.
Mind you, I said where states still allow women to make their own health care decisions. In the growing number of GOP-controlled states that believe the government knows better than 50% of its population, the drug chains are steering clear because the law does not allow them to do otherwise.
So we are talking about a CVS in your community that is doing what it does best — provide prescription medicines and other remedies to the public — being picketed and boycotted by people who want to impose their own rigid belief systems on men and women in other “freer” states that have not succumbed to a more fundamentalist approach to life in these United States.
So, like that wonderful comedian George Wallace — not the not-so-wonderful segregationist politician with the same name — I have been thinking.
And what I have been thinking about is what happens when those folks on the picket lines decide that women and their personal health care decisions are not busy-bodying enough to satisfy their desire to run everyone else’s life?
What, for example, happens when those folks wake up and realize that a great number of the unwanted, unneeded and unhealthy pregnancies that result in an unfortunate abortion decision are caused by that “little blue pill?”
Come on folks, you know what I am talking about.
But since women have been re-relegated to second-class
citizenship in this country, I want to speak directly to the men.
You fellows may soon have a choice to make.
You can protest against the pharmacies of the world for dispensing medicine the way they always have — to both men and women at the direction of their physicians — or you can decide whether that little blue pill is worth your making an exception to the anti-abortion playbook.
There may soon come a time when you can’t have it both ways, since both the pill and the pill have a whole lot to do with this abortion issue.
Which will it be, gentlemen?
Will you boycott the very business that allows you to conduct the very business that defines your existence?
Or will you refuse the hypocrisy of the moment and stand by your anti-abortion guns without your gun, so to speak.
I am betting that if push comes to shove, the male part of the species will act in its own best interests, which is and always has been to leave the women alone — alone to make their own decisions and alone to decide what is best for themselves and their families.
I know it is a bitter pill to swallow but we have to decide what is best for mankind. Or, at the very least, what is best for a man who has little or no desire to feel the continued wrath of the opposite sex.
That is not the way to a happy life.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
