California’s recent legislation, allowing doctors, pharmacists, and patients to omit their names from mailed abortion-pill prescriptions, represents yet another alarming expansion of the abortion industry’s grip, and raises serious ethical, legal, and moral concerns.
For SPUC, this move is not merely a matter of privacy or “choice,” but part of a broader pattern of dismantling protections for the unborn in favour of unrestricted abortion access.
SPUC maintains that human life begins at conception, and that each unborn child deserves full legal protection. In this view, the state has a duty to ensure that abortion is not made easier or more secretive, shielding the identities of those involved in abortions only further isolates the unborn child from any accountability, any due process, and ensures that abortion becomes ever more hidden, ever more normalised.
The California law effectively guts transparency and oversight. By permitting prescriptions to be issued without naming the prescribing doctor or identifying patient and pharmacist, the legislation obstructs the ability of oversight bodies to ensure safe medical practices are followed, to investigate misconduct, or to hold practitioners accountable. For SPUC, this is a slippery slope: when abortion is moved increasingly into private, unregulated realms, the risk increases that abortion becomes not only a moral wrong, but medically dangerous, particularly for vulnerable women.
SPUC worries that such laws reflect not compassion but coercion: they pressure states with restrictive laws to stand down, undercutting local democratic decisions protecting unborn life. Shield laws that protect providers mailing abortion pills into states that have banned abortion may seem to defend abortion “access” but from a pro-life perspective, they violate the principle that laws of states should meaningfully protect the unborn as much as those states and their citizens decide.
SPUC would argue instead for laws that protect both mother and unborn baby. Rather than allowing anonymity and shielding, legislation should increase accountability, require strict medical oversight, ensure informed consent, and uphold the value of unborn life. The unborn have no voice in these transactions; the less open the system, the more easily unborn children are treated as commodities rather than persons.
In conclusion, while California and similar states promote such laws under the banner of privacy and healthcare rights, from the SPUC standpoint they represent a distressing step toward eroding respect for unborn life, increasing risks for women, and abandoning moral and legal responsibilities. Society must resist normalising abortion by increasing its secrecy for where there is no names, there is no accountability; and where there is no accountability, injustice flourishes.
