Christian Investors Urge Pharmacies Not to Stock Abortion Pill Because It Will Eliminate Future Customers

Barf Bag: They seem not to realize that humans still need food and clothes regardless of how many children they have.

By Susan Rinkunas  |  August 9, 2024 | 7:00pm
Photo: Getty Images Politics
Christian Investors Urge Pharmacies Not to Stock Abortion Pill Because It Will Eliminate Future Customers

Welcome back to Barf Bag. 

Sometimes the forced-birth freaks go fully mask off and make clear that they oppose abortion because they care about having more humans to buy things.

This week, the right-wing law firm from Alliance Defending Freedom released multiple letters from Christian investors urging Costco, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, and McKesson not to stock the abortion drug mifepristone at their pharmacies. (Importantly, the drug is also used to manage miscarriages.) The signatories—who hold $172 million in ownership of the five publicly-traded retailers—argue that not only is filling mifepristone prescriptions “politically fraught,” but that facilitating abortions would reduce their customer base and make the companies less money in the long term. I am not joking.

Here’s a snippet from the ADF-facilitated letter:

Shrinking your customer base is also bad for business. The Brookings Institution recently estimated that the average American family will spend $310,000 to raise a child born in 2015. This includes over $50,000 in food and $15,000 on clothes, not to mention furniture, other household and healthcare items, toys and games, or diapers and formula, all things your stores sell. Dispensing the abortion drug will reduce demand for all of these and only make worse the crisis of record low birth rates.

Do these people realize that humans still need food and clothes regardless of how many children they have? Trying to guilt these huge corporations with talk about birth rates is just the white supremacist cherry on top.

But the Christian investors got even more specific in their concerns about just how much money they think these companies could lose. In a statement, investor David Bahnsen said this, perhaps not realizing that already-born people also buy everyday goods:

Just as important, selling chemical abortion drugs undermines a retail pharmacy’s bottom line. Instead of selling a lifetime supply of everyday goods like diapers, cough syrup, groceries, toys, food, and clothing, a store settles for a one-time purchase that undermines a lifetime of opportunity.

Another signatory of the ADF letter, proxy voting, and corporate engagement consultant Jerry Bowyer, did some cursed napkin math for an interview with American Family News. Here’s what Bowyer said:

Apart from the moral aspect, Bowyer says selling the drug makes no sense from a financial standpoint, as abortion eliminates future revenue from customers who would otherwise need diapers, formula, medicine, clothing, and a myriad of extras for the rest of their lives.

Costco, for example, could make $200 now off of the death of an unborn child, or it could make $12,000 over 10 years, he poses.

“How in the world can it be for the benefit of the company to kill future customers?” Bowyer asks. “There’s no way that it can be.”

I’m no finance bro, but even I understand that families struggling to get by due to children they can’t afford, have less money to spend at stores than people with a bunch of disposable income.

Conservatives really have a fetish for suggesting that abortion is bad for the economy, when the truth is that people denied abortions are four times more likely to live under the federal poverty line a few years later than women who got abortions. And the financial fallout also impacts the lives of the children these women already had—so the harm extends to the next generation. It’s banning abortion that’s bad for the economy.

But no, politicians love to talk about how aborted fetuses could have been workers who contribute to the economy and keep our haggard social safety net afloat. Just days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) said in a committee meeting that abortion has “taken away the very workforce that was needed to supply both Social Security and Medicare.” He’s ignoring that abortion helps other people stay in the workforce.

Nebraska state Sen. Steve Erdman (R) went on a racist Great Replacement Theory rant in April 2023 by saying that the state population hasn’t increased unless you count “foreigners” (sir, they count) and that the 200,000 abortions in Nebraska since Roe represented magical people who “could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.”

It seems to me that if lawmakers want people to have more kids, they should focus on increasing wages, making childcare affordable, and offering paid family leave. And if they’re concerned about properly funding Social Security and Medicare, they could instead focus on getting billionaires and giant corporations to actually pay their fair share of taxes. But such efforts would piss off their donors.

My colleague Kylie Cheung noted that conservatives who espouse these “aborted fetus as worker and consumer” talking points are saying the quiet part out loud: “Reproductive oppression is a central tenet of capitalism, because forced pregnancy and birth guarantee new, future generations of workers to exploit—an endless ‘supply,’ if you will, created through unthinkable state violence.”

And now, we wait to see if any of these companies take the letters’ psychotic bait.

  • Former president Donald Trump had a very normal week in which he:
    • congratulated Vladimir Putin over a deal that brought journalist Evan Gershkovich home,
    • compared his January 6 rally crowd to the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech,
    • railed against convicted felons being able to vote when he, himself, is a felon,
    • and confused former California Governor Jerry Brown with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown during a press conference [Washington Post/NBC News/Twitter/Reuters]
  • As Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for his second term, reporters found that he took a private flight in 2022 with Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 head honcho Kevin Roberts. [Washington Post]
  • Roberts is delaying the publication of his Christian Nationalist book until after the election, but news outlets already got advanced copies. [Associated Press/The New Republic/Media Matters]
  • Spoiler presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to planting a bear cub carcass in Central Park in 2014 because the trained falconer didn’t have time to take it to his fridge upstate where he stored meat for the ravens he trains. He also said he once had a “freezer full of” roadkill. [Associated Press]
  • After podcasting shithead Joe Rogan expressed support for Kennedy, he backtracked amid MAGA backlash to say it wasn’t an endorsement. [The Hollywood Reporter]
  • Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) said parents opposed to public schools displaying the Ten Commandments should just tell their kids not to look at them. [Washington Post]
  • Trump’s running mate and absolute freak J.D. Vance baselessly accused Kamala Harris‘s running mate Tim Walz, an Army National Guard, of trying to avoid deployment to Iraq. [HuffPost]
  • Get his ass, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. [Twitter]

 

This has been your weekly Barf Bag, thanks for reading! 

 
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