Let Pious Pharmacists Become Data Entry Clerks or Waste Collectors

Bernadine Healy has an excellent piece on the subject of how and why pharmacists are being allowed to play God with your right to get your prescriptions without interference.

Specifically:

Plan B has also been a political lightning rod for antiabortion activists, even though the drug does not disrupt or harm a pregnancy. Rather, it prevents pregnancy with a high-dose jolt of birth control hormones. Thus it decreases the risk of abortion. In short, spurious concerns both about women's sexual behavior and about abortion fuel the seemingly endless tempest surrounding women's appropriate and lawful use of an emergency drug.

The ACOG campaign, called "Ask me," effectively creates an over-the-counter option that subverts the FDA ruling. Doctors will offer information on the drug and prescriptions to women who, well, just ask. Patients can either keep the paper as Rx-in-waiting or have the prescription filled and ready in their medicine cabinets--which allows them to use the pills at their own discretion. Helping to spread the word are "Ask me" buttons, national ads, and posters for doctors' offices reminding women that "accidents happen" and "morning afters can be tough."

But advance prescriptions may not be enough. Some pharmacies don't carry the drug because of moral or religious objections. Even the behemoth Wal-Mart with its national chain of pharmacies refused for the longest time. After being forced by Illinois to stock the drug, sued in Massachusetts for not providing it, and compelled by that state's pharmacy board to change its ways, the company caved. Two months ago, Wal-Mart announced that all its pharmacies would carry Plan B and restated its policy that individual pharmacists who objected to this, or who felt uncomfortable dispensing the drug, could refer the patient elsewhere. No word about the patient's comfort.

Conscientious objector. This points to another hurdle: Despite a doctor's orders, a pharmacist can decide not to dispense the contraceptive based on moral or religious beliefs. Fine. But there must be an alternative pharmacist or pharmacy to fill the order, or else the conscientious objectors are imposing their beliefs on a woman who then becomes powerless to exercise her own.

Imagine if a pharmacist could block the sale of condoms based on religious persuasion. It's not so far-fetched; the Vatican historically has banned condoms, even opposing their distribution in Africa to protect against HIV. And would there not be an uproar if a pharmacist's own sense of sin used a man's marital status to determine whether or not to fill his prescription for Viagra? The debate over Plan B smacks of a double standard. But worse, without knowing beforehand of the pharmacist's opposition to the drug, a woman requesting it is not only turned away but also humiliated as her privacy is breached and her personal life judged.