Is your pharmacist facilitating the killing of the unborn?

Media Release 10 April 2025

Right to Life asks: next time you walk into a pharmacy, are you patronising a pharmacist who is an abortion provider, who willingly fills prescriptions for lethal abortion drugs intended to poison and kill unborn children up to ten weeks gestation? Those that do have the blood of innocent unborn children on their hands.

Pharmacies should be selling medications and remedies to help people live and flourish, but now they are selling lethal pills meant to kill children in the first ten weeks of life.

In response to a recent Official Information Act request from Right to Life, the Ministry of Health advised that the provisional total of unborn children killed by abortion drugs in early medical abortions in 2024 was 11 285. The innocent blood of these innocent children is on the hands of the pharmacists who were prepared to violate their professional ethics and provide these lethal drugs.

The Ministry of Health maintains a register of pharmacies which have applied to be registered as abortion providers, who are prepared to fill prescriptions for these lethal abortion drugs. The Ministry of Health recently disclosed that there are 570 pharmacies recorded on their register. There are 1100 registered pharmacies in New Zealand. Right to Life commends those pharmacists who refuse to participate in the killing of preborn children.

The government has now approved retail pharmacies to provide the abortion pills Mifepristone and Misoprostol on prescription. Now the Bargain Chemist and Chemist Warehouse chains are ready to profit from the murder of unborn children, as they have advised Right to Life that they are now filling prescriptions for abortion pills in their stores, and so are participating in chemical abortions nationwide. Bargain Chemist have 17 branches and Chemist Warehouse have 9 branches in New Zealand. Our government has allowed these pharmaceutical companies to become some of the largest abortion providers in New Zealand.

Right to Life is disappointed that Medsafe, the Pharmaceutical Council, appointed by the Minister of Health and the Pharmaceutical Society, all support pharmacists dispensing prescriptions for the abortion pills to kill unborn children.

Right to Life wrote to the Pharmacy Council in April 2023, to express concern that they were not upholding the ethics of the pharmaceutical profession, to dispense only medications to promote health and life, and not dispensing medications to kill their patients, the unborn. There was no reply to our letter.

Abortion-inducing drugs take the lives of unborn children and they are far more dangerous to pregnant women than surgical abortions. Studies show these drugs include a 53% greater risk of a negative health outcome for the pregnant women who take them!

This devastates women's health and makes access to kill unborn babies easier than ever. We still have time to stop this : Right to Life encourages concerned people to boycott these pharmacies, and any other pharmacy complicit in the killing of unborn children.

Pharmacies should be selling medications and remedies to help people live and flourish, but now they are selling lethal pills meant to kill children in the first ten weeks of life.

Right to Life asks, will you fight for the unborn by patronising only pharmacies which refuse to dispense these murder pills?

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life New Zealand Inc.