Kansas women to pay the price of Walgreens bowing to Kobach threat on abortion pills | Opinion
When Kris Kobach is your attorney general, you can count on him to do Kobach things.
But it’s a little unusual for someone as large and sophisticated as pharmacy titan Walgreens to roll over for him like the company did on Mifepristone, a drug commonly used to induce abortion.
Over the past couple of weeks, Kobach threatened Walgreens with prosecution if the company tries to distribute the drug through its pharmacies in Kansas — and Walgreens blinked.
“Walgreens does not intend to dispense Mifepristone within your state and does not intend to ship Mifepristone into your state from any of our pharmacies,” wrote the company’s executive vice president and global chief legal officer, Danielle C. Gray.
Kobach’s letter to Walgreens was his typical blend of faulty legal analysis and political bluster.
In it, he cites the Comstock Act, an 1873 morality law that was used for decades to stop the Postal Service from delivering condoms, birth-control pills and basically any written material or photographs having anything to do with the biological function known as sex.
Anthony Comstock, the guy the law was named after, was a misogynistic zealot who suppressed anything that didn’t fit his rigid and narrow-minded beliefs. He boasted that as a special postal inspector, he destroyed tons of other peoples’ mail.
It even inspired a word, “Comstockery,” which means excessive censorship and opposition to supposed immorality.
Come to think of it, today, we could call that Kobachery.
What Kobach doesn’t say in his letter to Walgreens (and CVS was sent a similar letter Tuesday) is that the plain-language reading of the Comstock Act hasn’t been in force for many decades.
The law’s been watered down repeatedly by Congress and court rulings over the last 150 years. That’s why you can buy condoms.
As for abortion pills, a legal analysis by the U.S. Justice Department ruled in December that the Postal Service can deliver Mifepristone, unless it can be proved that the drug will be used for unlawful abortions.
Here’s another spot where Kobach dissembles in his letter: “Kansas law requires that drug to only be ‘administered by or in the same room and in the physical presence of the physician who prescribed, dispensed or otherwise provided the drug to the patient.’”
What he left out was that the law was enjoined and declared unenforceable in 2011, shortly after it passed. Last year, it got to the Kansas Court of Appeals in another case, which again upheld the injunction and allows clinics to provide abortions by telemedicine.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Kobach letter without a dig at Joe Biden.
This time, it’s this: “President Biden is beholden to the country’s most extreme pro-abortion voices, who constantly advocate for expanding the abortion regime without any consideration of legality or even women’s safety.”
Kobach, of course, is beholden to the country’s most extreme anti-abortion voices.
It’s worth noting that Kansas voices, specifically a broad majority of voters’ voices, said loud and clear last August that they’ve had enough of anti-abortion extremism.
But Kobach backed down Walgreens with a legal opinion that’s contradicted by the Justice Department, a Kansas law that’s been ruled unenforceable and likely unconstitutional, all the while flouting the will of the voters.
So why didn’t Walgreens just tell him to pound sand?
The most likely explanation is that it simply wasn’t worth the effort.
Kansas Mifepristone would be such a tiny fraction of the company’s $138 billion in annual sales that it’s not even a rounding error on the profit-loss statement.
So Kobach wins, Walgreens shrugs.
And the only losers are Kansas women far outside Wichita and Kansas City, who can’t fill a perfectly legal prescription at what is, in many places, the only drug store in town.
All because a fanatical official far from their homes has judged them as immoral.
That’s Kobachery for you.
This story was originally published February 22, 2023 at 5:20 AM.
