WASHINGTON — A pro-life group is applauding plans by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration to destroy about 150,000 abortion pills that cost taxpayers $112,000 but were never used.
Hochul’s team bought in 2023 the stockpile of misoprostol, part of a two-drug medicinal abortion regimen, but the state Department of Health is now set to destroy it because the pills have expired.
There was enough for about 12,500 doses, something first reported by the New York Public News Network.
“I think it’s a great victory for the pro-life movement,” Shawn Carney, CEO & president of 40 Days for Life, told The Post. “I think it’s humiliating for all these people who ran out and said there’s going to be more [abortion] than there ever have been.”
Carney isn’t giving Hochul too much credit for the move, noting that her administration had no choice but to destroy the pills. Still, he feels that it’s a positive development that those potential abortions never took place.
“It’s definitely great for the pro-life movement,” he added. “I don’t know any other option that she has. I think that the state government and the governors, particularly the Democrats, have spent way too much time trying to promote themselves as abortion pill superstars.
“They spent way too much time on this issue.”
Hochul’s team hadn’t dipped into the stockpile and there are no plans to replenish the stockpile, according to the agency.
The administration made the purchase in the aftermath of a court battle over the legality of mifepristone, the other major drug used to cause abortion.
Mifepristone is essentially used to end the pregnancy, and misoprostol is used to clear out the uterus afterward. Notably, misoprostol is usually far cheaper than mifepristone.
Chemical abortions were responsible for nearly two-thirds of all abortions nationwide in 2023, according to data from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.
Other states such as California, Massachusetts, and Oregon similarly built up stockpiles around that time, with the Golden State distributing the pills.
All of that came around the time of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to end past legal precedents guaranteeing a nationwide right to abortion.
Critics of the Supreme Court argued that after Dobbs, some data indicated that abortion rates shot up. But Carney theorized that those figures might be skewed by people stockpiling abortion pills and not using them.
“It’s another sort of note of evidence that the abortion numbers we hear today are completely fabricated by the left because they’re taking into account these stockpiled abortion pills, which, of course, today we get more evidence that they weren’t even used,” Carney contended.
“They’re just saying there’s more abortions now than ever, therefore we need it, and it needs to be deregulated, and it needs to be legal,” he went on. “It’s completely false.”
