#BoycottWalgreens Trends as Customers Share Stories of Being Denied Contraception & More

Walgreens is currently under fire over accounts of its treatment of women and all potentially pregnant people, as people share disturbing stories of ways in which the store and its employees have allegedly tried to cash in on their newfound freedoms to exploit and control our bodies post-Roe v Wade.

People have been sharing stories online about being denied access to contraception in Walgreens stores and pharmacies, and a woman named Jessica Pentz shared her story with the Star Tribune earlier this month. She forgot her oral contraception at home while on vacation with her husband, so she stopped into a Walgreens to pick up a box of condoms. Pentz said the clerk working at the time refused to sell them to her, saying it was against his religious beliefs.

She says he told her, “I can’t sell those to you,” adding, “Well, we can sell that to you. But I will not, because of my faith.”

A spokesperson for the company told the outlet, “Our company policy allows team members to step away from completing a transaction to which they have a moral objection and refer the transaction to a fellow team member or manager who will complete the customer’s request.” And that’s apparently what the store employee did. Pentz said he called a manager over and “walked away with a smirk.”

Another woman shared her story on TikTok, detailing her extreme difficulties in getting her regular birth control prescription refilled after being seemingly explicitly lied to by an employee.

You can watch the entire video below, but she describes being told, via the pharmacy’s automated system, that her prescription was ready for pick up, then it was delayed. Then, she went into the store to check on it and was met with a pharmacist’s claim that they “wouldn’t” (not couldn’t) refill it and that she had to contact her provider. She did so, and her provider said there shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place and approved the refill. By this point, her prescription is overdue and not only is she unprotected from pregnancy, but it’s seriously messing with her hormones.

When the woman (TikTok user @abigailmartiin) went back into the pharmacy, she says she spoke with a different pharmacist, who said that the employee who originally denied her the refill had been doing similar things for weeks—i.e. since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

“So first, they want us to stop getting pregnant and having abortions,” Martin says in the video, “and then they don’t want to help us prevent that pregnancy.”

But denying access to contraception isn’t the only disturbing way Walgreens is reportedly attacking reproductive freedoms. A person with the handle of Nicole (@melancholynsex) on Twitter shared that after buying a pregnancy test in-store, they then received this gift basket of Enfamil brand baby formula and other products.

It is incredibly disturbing to think that a company would use data like this after it was acquired through, most likely, use of a rewards card or possibly just a regular credit card (both of which Nicole used for the purchase and both of which are known sources for data brokers). There’s been much talk lately of deleting period-tracking apps because of where that information can end up, and just in case anyone thought that was an overreaction, this should be proof that we’re basically living in a post-overreaction society when it comes to reproductive privacy.

Nicole confidently says in the thread that this “gift” could only reasonably have stemmed from the pregnancy test purchase. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Walgreens responded: “The privacy of our customers is important to Walgreens. We do not provide individual customer purchase information to Enfamil.”

Not only is the apparent data mining upsetting but the nature of the package itself is also extremely presumptive and problematic, as Nicole lays out in a thread.

This is not the kind of package that would be well-received by someone whose pregnancy test was positive and who didn’t want to be pregnant—especially if they live in a state where abortion is now illegal—nor would it be for someone whose test was negative but who wants children, especially if they have fertility challenges. This could also be extremely dangerous if the recipient is in an abusive relationship and the package is intercepted by their partner. And as if a package like this weren’t unethical enough, this comes at a time when the U.S. is still experiencing a massive shortage of infant formula.

It’s barely been three weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and this is already where we’re finding ourselves.

This article has been updated to include a response from Walgreens.

(featured image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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