Thursday, March 31, 2005

Medicine: The Separation of Church and Pharmacy

By way of MediaMatters, The American Center for Law & Justice has a good piece on the rise of so called "conscience clauses" being passed in several states. These laws permit doctors, pharmacists, or other health care workers to not provide access or information on anything they find morally offensive. Such laws have already been used to refuse prescriptions for Ritalin, emergency contraception for a rape victim, and birth control refills. One pharmacist not only refused to give out the birth control, but even refused to return the prescription slip.

MediaMatters points out:

Though "conscience clause" advocates prefer to focus on birth control pills -- and the media reports that cover the controversy do likewise -- their position that pharmacists need not fill prescriptions they disagree with has far-reaching implications. By the same rationale, a pharmacist who believes, as the Rev. Jerry Falwell once claimed, that AIDS is "God's punishment for homosexuals" could refuse to fill a prescription for an AIDS patient. Pharmacists could refuse to fill prescriptions for heart medicine for the elderly, antidepressants for a suicidal patient -- anything.
Luckily the Michigan government defeated a bill to introduce these clauses, but there's no telling what might happen in the future.

At what point do people simply realize that when their career choices might conflict with their moral views, maybe they should find a different profession?

1 comment:

Garrett said...

I believe the operative point in this debate isn't so much that pharmacists or doctors should be forced to deliver services that they are morally opposed to; they shouldn't. But that pharmacist or doctor, by virtue of being licensed, should be required to make sure that a service deemed standard of care by the medical community can be obtained from somewhere else.

If you're in a small town with one pharmacy, and you deny a 15 year old who can't drive to get to the next pharmacy emergency contraception, that's criminal. However, if you're a pharmacist in Ann Arbor, and there's another pharmacy across the street, it seems perfectly valid to say, "Hey, I can't fill this, but let me call it in across the street."

So should a strict pro-lifer not be able to be a pharmacist or a doctor? Of course not. But they better damn well practice in a context where their personal beliefs do not conflict with the ability of a patient to receive what is standard of care--and abortions and birth control and emergency contraception are in fact standard of care. If a person disputes standard of care, THEN they have no right being in the profession.

Disagreeing with standard of care is valid and even respectable. Obstructing it is sick and criminal.

So does that mean that I think the pharmacist in podunk should have to drive the fifteen year old across the river to Podunk Flats to the next pharmacy if he denied the girl emergency contraception? You betcha :)