Next time you’re in Costco, look around and ask yourself what you have in common with your fellow shoppers. No matter where you are in the country, chances are you’ll have no problem identifying that almost everyone there is buying in bulk to feed their large and growing families.
That’s something both of us know firsthand. One of us (Tim) has seven kids, while the other (Michael) has three young sons who can often plow through a Costco haul as quickly as a family twice their size.
Most families can relate. From diapers and formula to lunch meat and eggs—and even the vacuums and washing machines to clean up after the meals—over 65 million American households hold Costco memberships. Many of those families join Costco in the earliest moments of parenthood, stopping by the warehouse club after Saturday soccer games to load up for the coming week.
With so much of its business model focused on families—and the bigger, the better—one of the last items you’d ever expect to see at Costco is mifepristone, the drug that now accounts for more than 60 percent of all abortions nationwide.
Yet, despite Costco’s family-oriented business model, it has spent much of the past three years in the crosshairs of activists who demand that the store begin stocking its 550 pharmacies across the country with a drug designed to eliminate a potential life-long shopper and shrink the company’s customer base. The Brookings Institute estimated that the average American family will spend $310,000 to raise a child born in 2015.
The same goes for Costco’s primary competitor, Sam’s Club, which operates as a subsidiary of retailing giant Walmart. Together with household brands like Albertsons and Kroger, these big box stores came under pressure from far-left activists (including some government officials) in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that struck down Roe v. Wade.
While abortion headed to the states, the Biden administration (and Obama administration before that) busied itself by paring down a series of FDA-mandated patient protections that included in-person visit requirements in place since mifepristone’s initial approval in the waning days of the Clinton administration in 2000.
As minimal as those original safeguards proved—mifepristone warns on its own label that one in 25 women who ingest the drug will wind up in the emergency room, after all—their sudden absence wrote a political prescription that far-left abortion advocates sought to fill at every pharmacy in the country. Recent studies have now shown that even these troubling statistics significantly underestimate the harms and risks of mifepristone to women, 22 state attorneys general recently highlighted in a letter calling on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to reinstate the original protocols.
Indeed, recent comments from Kennedy have signaled that a broader administration review of the drug’s safety profile could be on the horizon.
Unfortunately, in the heady days following Dobbs, both Walgreens and CVS folded to the pressure immediately, citing their commitment to “advancing women’s health.” The next frontier, at least in the minds of ideologues like Planned Parenthood darling and now-failed New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander, was to demand that major retailers including Costco, Walmart, Albertsons, and Kroger to start stocking their pharmacy shelves with the deadly and dangerous drug.
But we beat these activists to the punch. Leveraging conservative shareholders with over $100 billion in assets, treasurers and financial officers in 14 states, and over 9,000 signatures from Costco members, investors, and concerned citizens, we have engaged in a years-long dialogue with Costco to let its leadership know where its customers and investors truly stand.
In every aspect of this advocacy, we highlighted the uncertain legal landscape and politically divisive nature that mifepristone represents. As unapologetic Christians driven by our faith, our investors and allies have absolutely no interest in gambling our financial futures on a drug that violates our commitment the value and dignity of life—including life in the womb. We also underscored the fact that dispensing mifepristone is rife with risk in an unsettled legal, regulatory, and political landscape at both the state and federal level and that every one-time purchase of mifepristone eliminates at least one lifelong customer from the marketplace. Ethics aside, that’s just bad business.
Thankfully, Costco is listening. Earlier this month, as we prepared to file a shareholder resolution at Costco calling for transparency on the issue, Costco representatives confirmed to us that they’ve decided their best course of action is to stay away from mifepristone altogether.
That’s a major win for every Costco investor, regardless of their views on abortion. And Costco is not alone. We’ve heard similar commitments from Kroger and Walmart, while Albertsons has kept its distance from the issue despite agitation from far-left activists.
While Walgreens and CVS have announced plans to close hundreds of locations in the coming years, shrinking their footprint in response to declining retail traffic and other headwinds, Costco is moving in the opposite direction. The company is opening dozens of new warehouses in 2025 and expanding its reach to serve more families nationwide. This focus on growth reflects the strength of Costco’s member-driven model and its commitment to meeting customer needs rather than chasing divisive political causes.
Mifepristone represents zero upside for a business that relies on families to keep its doors open. What we do know is that selling the drug is legally risky—especially considering the currently uncertain legal and political landscape.
Americans are divided on abortion, and it’s been that way for five decades. But the place to work those differences out is the ballot box, not the corporate boardroom. And certainly not at your local Costco.
