I honestly think that the best part is the quote from David Christiensen of the Family Research Council who has the following to say…
This strikes me as an odd statement. If you have qualms about the morality of abortions, you should probably not be getting a job at an abortion clinic. Or are people regularly forced into working at abortion clinics? Do abortion doctors show up at Home Depot with a pickup truck in the early morning hours and find bunches of nurses and doctors standing around waiting for day labor in a surgery theater, an ER or building a house?
Edit: Yes, I’m being a little reductive there toward the end. I understand that what he really meant was more to address pharmacists who have a problem with giving out birth control pills and his belief that they shouldn’t have to.
Pharmacists are free to believe whatever they want, of course, but I think it’s also reasonable that their employer should be free to fire them if they refuse to do their jobs. I think there’s a line between exercising religious freedom and demanding that the rest of the world to conform to your religion, and this sort of thing crosses it. Birth control is one of the most common prescription medications in the US, and if you have a serious issue with it, then maybe you should have thought about that before becoming a pharmacist. If you can find an employer that shares your beliefs, fine and well. But expecting the government to compel pharmacies to shape their business around your idiosyncrasies is crazy.
Morally speaking, physicians, pharmacists, etc. are allowed to refuse treatment they see as unethical. That’s not the same as saying that patients can’t get the treatment. It just means that it’s optional. The tricky part, as Ben notes, is what the employer of such a person can or should do.
Right. And the thing that sucks for the employer in this scenario is that they don’t even have a way to avoid the situation. Unlike the employee, who can refrain from applying for jobs with companies that do things that he considers unethical, the employer can’t screen potential employees based on religious views, because that’s illegal. So they just have to hire and hope that their employees will actually do what they hired them for. Because if they don’t, they have no recourse.
I’m not sure I agree. In my view pharmacies are about as close as you can get to being a public service as you can get without actually being one. People depend on them for their well being, and as such I’m not sure we should grant them any license to deny legitimate prescriptions. Whether or not a certain medication should be prescribed to a patient is between that patient and their doctor, and I don’t see why the person who puts the pills in a bottle should have any say in the process.
I really started the thread to point out that the Department of Health and Human Services is looking to expand the definition of ‘abortion’ to cover just about anything that can be used to prevent pregnancies, not to debate the pharmacy issue.
This is just craziness. I had a girlfriend who was on birth control pills to control her hormone levels – nothing to do with pregnancies. Does HHS want a note from the doctor explaining how any medication is going to be used?
If it’s a moral argument, then they’re not really going to care what the main reason is, as long as the possibility of an “abortion” could still occur. They’re not going to assume that you would be abstinent with her or also using some other non-offensive contraception, either.
If it does go through, it might make outlawing abortion altogether more difficult, since it becomes a bigger umbrella that affects far more people. Or they might push it through anyway, and no more birth control pills for anyone…
hmmm…what about the MULTITUDE of drugs that CAN cause abortion???
There’s tons of things out there that one shouldn’t take while pregnant. Does it only count if it actually causes an abortion? What about miscarriage? How do we KNOW it was the drug that caused the abortion? MAYBE it was THE HAND OF GOD!!!
This shit just pisses me off.
And, every pharmacy should ask each pharmacist and tech if they will fill all legal prescriptions they recieve.
Well, I guess it makes god the greatest abortionist of all. Only 15 percent of fermented embryos manage to implant in the uterus. God personally aborts 85% of all people according to this definition.
A pharmacy, being a privately owned business, has a right to choose whatever the hell they want to sell, as long as the product is legal. If they want to sell RU-486, products that can be distilled into Meth, cigarettes, bogus weightloss pills and those little jesus fish emblems for cars, that’s certainly their right, just like it’s their right to object to any or all of those products…
Perhaps I’m not remembering my grade 8 sex ed classes correctly, but don’t birth control pills work by preventing ovulation? How can that possibly be considered equivalent to abortion? You can’t terminate a pregnancy if there is not a pregnancy to terminate!
While I don’t agree with it, I can at least understand the point of view that the morning after pill/Plan B could be called an “abortion pill”. Regular birth control pills are an entirely different matter, though.
I’m going back to some old classes too, but isn’t one of the means of preventing pregnancy a change to the uterine lining that prevent a fertilized egg from attaching and developing into a fetus? That could be considered abortionesque I suppose.
