An Albuquerque woman is now seeking legal action against Walgreens after she was denied birth control-related medication at one of their pharmacy locations.
In August 2016, a pharmacist working for Walgreens refused to refill a prescription for the drug misoprostol, which was for the woman’s daughter who had been experiencing difficult menstrual cycles. Misoprostol is a synthetic hormone is used to soften the cervix to prep it for the insertion of the IUD. It is also sometimes utilized for induced abortions. The pharmacist assumed the latter use was intended and refused to refill the prescription based on his “personal beliefs.”
In this case, the drug was intended to control the difficult menstrual cycles of the woman’s teenage daughter. However, it does not matter what the drug would have been intended for, because women should be able to have control over their own bodies. This case is not unique. In 2012, another Albuquerque woman was similarly denied her birth control by another Walgreens pharmacist.
These cases are growing nationwide. Along with the increase in cases of women being denied birth control in recent years, women’s rights and reproductive healthcare are under attack. Recently, anti-women activists have been campaigning in New Mexico against Albuquerque abortion providers. Their recent method is to slander medical providers by using medically false propaganda about so-called “born alive” abortions. This is the utterly false claim that botched abortions result in surviving infants.
Despite these accusations being medically false and not ever having actually occurred in any documented instance, this urban legend has made its way into legislation in a bill proposed by state Rep. Rod Montoya, (R-Farmington) which subjects a doctor to a second-degree felony for born alive cases. The problem is that in the bill the born alive definition is extremely broad and even includes deaths occurring after wanted pregnancies carried to term! This is an attack not only on women, but also medical providers who work in women’s healthcare.
New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the nation. Reproductive rights are related to economic rights. In our society, women are still being discriminated against at work and even fired for their pregnancies. New Mexico currently has a very high rate of Medicaid-insured patients and with Planned Parenthood as well as Medicaid under attack, women’s healthcare is ever becoming more dangerous.
New Mexico ranks 49th in the country in overall child well-being and 45 percent of single mothers in the state have no access to healthcare and live in poverty. Nationwide, there have also been an increase in mother and infant mortality deaths. The mortality rate for mothers is highest in Texas-a state in which Planned Parenthood was defunded. These facts punch a gaping hole in the pretext of anti-abortion legislation protecting the rights of children. These attacks on women and clinics like Planned Parenthood, put women of color and poor working class women at the brunt of these offenses.
Attacks on women’s rights are not solely the consequence of extreme religious belief but are an efficient political tool to subjugate the entire working class. A working mother, for example, with debt and a low paying job will likely be fearful of demanding better pay. This keeps economic wages low for the entire working class. The woman’s struggle is of course also inseparable from the LGBTQ struggle, as our oppressions all emerged with the development of class society. As socialists and feminists, we stand in solidarity with all communities that are under attack and realize that our struggles are interlinked. Women hold up half the sky; without women there is no revolution.
“The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky.” – Thomas Sankara
