Women Vs. Morally Righteous Pharmacists

The last few days, there’s been quite a buzz about how Target now is backing its pharmacists who refuse to fill valid prescriptions for emergency contraception. Personally, I’m alarmed, because like AMERICAblog’s John in DC, I’m concerned about where the line will be drawn if this continues.

I particular like the opinion piece of Dr. Erik Steele, chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, that appeared in the Bangor News:

The reluctance of a pharmacist morally opposed to abortion to do anything that might result in an abortion is certainly understandable. However, a pharmacist pursing his or her moral and political agendas in the pharmacy makes a bull running amok in the china shop looks like a neurosurgeon operating in the brain by comparison. The idea is not just a slippery slope; it’s a greased chute to pharmacy chaos for three key reasons.

First, once we establish the precedent that a pharmacist can refuse to fill a legal, properly prescribed medication for personal reasons there is no place to set a limit on the practice; a pharmacist could conceivably refuse any prescription based on some ethical objection.

With such a precedent, a pharmacist could refuse prescriptions for narcotics because he or she thinks patients who use them long term are junkies, or prescriptions for medications derived from stem cell research because the research cells came from human fetuses. One might object to the dispensing of pork insulin because it was derived from animals, or in the past to growth hormone because it once was derived from human cadavers. Misoprostol is an ulcer medication which can be used to cause abortion; could a pharmacist refuse to dispense that? One pharmacist might refuse any prescription for emergency contraception, while another might agree to dispense it for prevention pregnancy after rape.

Once this line is crossed, there is no other place to draw a new line, and any of us might be the next target of the pharmacist putting his personal agenda between us and our medications.

Second, allowing pharmacists to refuse legitimate prescriptions on ethical grounds means there is no protection for the patient from a pharmacist pursuing any ethical agenda at the public setting of the prescription counter. That is among the last places in the world one ought to be able to pursue such an agenda. Why would this privacy-loving society allow a pharmacist to force a woman standing at that counter in front of other customers to be subject to a moral debate about her need for emergency contraception, especially in a country in which one half of all women will experience an unplanned pregnancy? [“Pharmacy is a health care setting, not a public forum”]

After all, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with my doctors discussing my situation and my choices where my health is concerned. I’ve already established a relationship so to speak and I trust my doctor to help me make the best choice. It’s been a long time since I’ve known a pharmacist or his staff as well or rather, since they’ve known me. Not to mention, it’s none of his or her business unless I care to share why I might be taking a particular drug that he or she might find some moral or religious reason to disapprove of.

For example, I do get the Depo Provera shot every three months. Heck, I’ve been on birth control for most of my adult life. However, I take it because I have a medical condition that would render my life pretty damned miserable otherwise. My physicians have helped me to make the decision as to which medicine would be best to control my condition and I would be pretty damned pissed if I went to fill a prescription and the pharmacist wouldn’t because of a predetermined religious judgement on my personal life that he or she knows nothing about. If that happened, I’d likely take all of my pharmacy business elsewhere and since I have quite a bit wrong with me, that’s quite a bit of pharmacy business.

And as many people have suggested, what if a pharmacist decides not to dispense HIV meds because they opposed homosexuals and drug users? Will a person have to prove that he or she got the illness from tainted blood in a transfusion or from an accident while he or she was working at a hospital?

Finally, most pharmacists cannot refuse emergency contraception on moral grounds without having to confront the hypocrisy of working in a retail setting that sells lots of things that harm and kill. The typical retail pharmacy sits in a store that sells cigarettes, liquor, alcohol, acetaminophen and the decongestant pseudoephedrine, just to name a few products which can kill people.

Cigarettes cause more than 400,000 premature deaths a year in this country, and pregnancy complications including low birth weight and premature labor. They also cause Sudden Infant Death syndrome. A pharmacist cannot refuse emergency contraception prescriptions in a store that also sells cigarettes without overdosing on his own hypocrisy.

Pseudoephedrine can be cooked up into methamphetamine, aka speed, a ruinous drug that is taking the country by storm. Acetominophen is commonly used by depressed patients to commit suicide. Alcohol is social mayhem and death in liquid form, causing an estimated 100,000 deaths in this country each year, and untold human misery. It is also our most common preventable cause of mental retardation, because it causes fetal alcohol syndrome. One has to wonder at a shield law for pharmacists that would allow them to refuse to dispense a product that might cause fetal abortion and still work in a store that sells a product that causes fetal brain damage.

At the pharmacy counter that all sounds like this: “OK, that’s $4.25 for your death-dealing and pregnancy-harming cigarettes, $7.95 for your fetal brain-damaging beer, $2.29 for your potential suicide agent acetominophen, and $1.95 for your methamphetamine-precursor decongestant. Anything else? Oh, you want emergency contraception? No, sorry, you can’t get that from me because I think it might harm a human life.” [“Pharmacy is a health care setting, not a public forum”]

John in D.C. takes it a bit further in wondering what the next step is.

So let’s ask Target if they also support the following Target employees:

• Check out clerks who verify how fat you are before selling you that package of potato chips?
• Pharmacists who don’t want to fill prescriptions for Jewish customers who killed Christ.
• Pharmacists who don’t want to help customers who worship a “Satanic counterfeit” (read: “The Pope,” in fundie-speak).
• Pharmacists who only dispense HIV medicine to “innocent victims” of AIDS.
• Pharmacists who want proof that women seeking emergency contraception were really raped, and that they didn’t “deserve it.”
• Pharmacists (or cashiers) who are Christian Scientists - can they refuse to sell any medicine, even aspirin, to anyone?
• Pharmacists who won’t sell birth control pills to unmarried women, condoms to unmarried men, or any birth control at all because God doesn’t want people spilling their seed.
• Can fundamentalist Christian employees refuse to interact with gay people in any way, shape or form since gays are sinners, abominations, biological errors, and very likely pedophiles? [“Target now saying ’screw you’ if their pharmacist doesn’t want to fill your prescription because ‘you’re a sinner’ “]

You know what? I’m a sinner, but that’s between me and God, not me and my pharmacist. I’ll have a long conversation with God when I die about whether or not he approved of my lifestyle choices and all. I shouldn’t have to explain to someone who’s whole purpose in this life is to fill my doctor-prescribed prescriptions.

Planned Parenthood has a handy email form that does most of the work for you to voice your opinion to Target, Safeway, Giant, Duane Reade, and Piggly Wiggly regarding this issue.

And now that I think about it, why is this a women-only issue? Why aren’t we hearing complaints from men who are being refused their viagra or condoms?

tags: Women's Rights, Pharmacies, birth control, Plan B

4 comments

1. on October 21, 2005 at 2:51 pm

   Tamara said:

   Excellent post. This is the first I’ve heard about the Target angle, and I’m quite disappointed. Ugh. My favorite store! I’ll be sending them a note, thanks for all the links.

2. on October 21, 2005 at 3:22 pm

   Yzabel said:

   Gah, this issue has been bothering me serious since I’ve first heard of it last year, and I don’t even live in the States. It just feels so gross and shocking to me, both because I’m not a believer (and especially not in favor of mixing personal beliefs and work), and because this wouldn’t be acceptable in my country. I don’t think that any pharmacist even tried to do that here, and if they did, they’d be out for a serious whack.

   Regardless, I agree on the problem of the precedent it may create. What would the next step be? Refusing to sell periodic towels to women because, OMG, they have a period every month, it’s like an abortion, all these potential fetuses that aren’t conceived? Bah, I’d better stop. Just writing about this makes me feel like drowning the Target morons in the toilet.

3. on October 21, 2005 at 5:09 pm

   n. mallory said:

   Yzabel brings up an excellent point. Religion in the workplace is incredibly frowned on and yet we are all supposed to respect each other’s differences and embrace diversity. Many of us have to sit through some sort of diversity training once a year. If say I have a problem with a Jewish co-worker because I’m Christian, I could be written up and fired for treating him badly or for refusing to work on projects with him because of just that. However it’s o.k. for a religious pharmacist to treat a person with a potentially differend belief system badly and refused to do his job? If the religious pharmacist were to refuse to work with another co-worker for the same reasons, would he be punished?

4. on November 20, 2005 at 11:56 am

   M. Geronimo said:

   This is a good website regarding the state laws (or lack thereof is more like it) governing pharmacists’ refusal to fill EC. Only three states explicitly require pharmacists to fill valid prescriptions (Illinois, No. Carolina & Mass….CA requires a protocol for pharmacists to ensure a prescription will be filled if that particular pharmacist refuses to fill it):

   http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/8-2005_Don’tTakeNo.pdf

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