Despite the grocery and retail giant’s slogan being “Save Money; Live Better,” a recent memo from Walmart to their employees is showing that, depending upon the circumstances of your conception, the company may not be very supportive of your life. Their memo also unfortunately reiterated medical myths as fact — making this message a terrible combo of both discrimination and misinformation to the 2.3 MILLION people they employ. Here’s what you need to know about this new Walmart policy in order to be an informed consumer:  

Prior to this month, the Associated Press found that Walmart’s healthcare plans for employees prohibited paying for abortions unless “the health of the mother would be in danger if the fetus were carried to term, the fetus could not survive the birthing process, or death would be imminent after birth.” However, this recently changed through last week’s updated memo.  

In the new message to employees, Corporate Walmart stated that the company’s health care plans would now cover abortion for employees when “there is a health risk to the mother, rape or incest, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or lack of fetal viability.” The memo also stated that the new policy will cover “travel support” for Walmart workers seeking abortions that are not available within 100 miles of their locations.  

There’s a lot of wrong all wrapped up in this memo so let’s break it down piece by piece —starting with the fact that devaluing the lives of those who were conceived in rape or incest is discrimination, plain and simple. If someone wants to argue otherwise, ask them to answer these simple questions:  

Why is it that Walmart is making special efforts for employees to be able to abort these children? Why are children conceived in these circumstances put in the same category as life-threatening pregnancies? The only obvious answers would be that Walmart considers these children to be a burden as opposed to children conceived in any other way — and making a child out to be less than worthy of life based upon the actions of their parents is utterly wrong.  

Second, it is pure and unadulterated misinformation to say that any of the following are treated by abortion: pregnancy-related health risks to the mother, ectopic pregnancies, or miscarriages. Since the abortion lobby and Walmart are clearly confused on this point, here is a simple explanation:  

1. When there are pregnancy-related health risks to a mother, physicians take painstaking care to attempt to save the life of both mother and child — which is the opposite of abortion, for which the sole purpose is to kill the child. Thus, the methodology between the two is going to be very different because one procedure is carefully trying to preserve preborn and maternal life, and the other is attempting to kill preborn life either through starvation, poisoning, or dismemberment.   

2. With ectopic pregnancies, we’re talking about two different parts of the body because ectopic pregnancies occur in the fallopian tube, not the uterus. These pregnancies are life-threatening and do need to be treated but attempting to treat them through abortion wouldn’t work at all. It would be akin to breaking your arm and then trying to treat it through physical therapy on your leg. Wrong body part; wrong treatment. Planned Parenthood used to admit that, as well.  

3. As previously stated, the sole purpose of abortion is to kill the child, but in a miscarriage, the child has unfortunately already passed away — making the two utterly different. While the procedure used to manage the miscarriage is sometimes used to perform abortions (called a D&C), it remains different because in the management of miscarriage, the physician is not killing the child.  

As the pro-life movement and the Pro-Life Generation consider what to do with this new information, we need to consider what Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, once said, “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”  

Will you be firing Walmart? Tell us in the form below: