So you guys would make it mandatory that an ob-gyn perform
elective abortions (read: non-emergency) just because he/she happens to be the only such doctor within a 50 mile radius? I don't agree with that. Not trying to put words in your mouths, but the pharmacist issue is, at base (ignoring the fact that the pills can be used for things other than birth control, and that abortion is a much more divisive and forceful issue than bith control), a similar one.
However, as I said in my previous posts, due to the great inconvenience it would cause (since you'd presumably have to use the pharmacy more frequently than you'd get abortions), I will admit that the pharmacy issue (in rural areas where an alternative might not be close by) is a troubling one for me, even though I agree in principle with so-called "conscience clauses".
Perhaps-- though it would obviously be attacked by proponents of conscience exemptions for pharmacists as being an inconsistently applied standard-- we should allow it in areas where there are several pharmacists, but not in places where there's only one for a large area. Still, that strikes me as getting too specific, and thus likely wouldn't make sound policy.
I honestly don't know what the answer is, really. In principle, I agree with conscience clauses. However, I also agree that people should not have to be
unduly inconvenienced just because someone's beliefs go against their own and that person happens to be in a position of "power" (i.e., is capable of withholding a service or product). I'd
almost be inclined to say that it would be reasonable to
not have conscience clauses for pharmacists but keep them for nurses/physicians, but then, as before, that would seem to be exclusionary (towards pharmacists) and overly specific, and could thus be easily criticized. Sure, you could just say that people shouldn't become pharmacists if they have such an issue with birth control, but-- again-- that is analogous to saying that somebody shouldn't become an ob-gyn unless they were fine with performing
elective abortions; in both cases (the pharmacist and the doctor), the procedure/action in question constitutes but a small fraction of their duties/knowledge/expertise/responsibilities, and so I don't see how saying "don't become one, then" is applicable in either instance.
I'd definitely be open to hearing arguments either way, though, because as I said, it's a tricky issue that requires the needs and rights of various parties to be balanced. In the case of an elective abortion, the one-time inconvenience of driving an hour or two to the next town to have the surgery seems to be comparatively insignificant when weighed against the right of a physician to not be forced to perform a procedure they may view as morally repugnant (rightly or wrongly-- I'm not making a value judgment). However, in the pharmacist's case, the repeated inconvenience of having to drive that same distance every week, or twice a week, and the fact that the birth control issue itself is not as forceful as abortion (meaning that one could have firm beliefs about both of these issues, but I think we'd all agree that performing an abortion has the potential to be much more psychologically damaging/morally repulsive to an opponent of it than filling a birth control prescription is), would seem to indicate that the inconvenience would "outweigh" the pharmacist's right to follow his conscience (or at least
more outweigh it than in the case of the abortion). Still, I always hate assigning "weights" to abstract notions, but sometimes it's necessary; whether it's necessary
here is for someone far more intelligent than myself to determine.
A tricky issue imo. Obviously, the pharmacist in the original poster's article was
way out of line, primarily because he refused to either give the prescription back (in which case I would have probably hopped over the counter and taken it
) or pass it along to a pharmacist who wasn't morally opposed to the notion of birth control. Still, the larger issue remains, and I'd say it's not as cut and dry as the above posters are suggesting.
Also, Tom and Human, I agree that an organization has every right to fire such a person if they object on moral grounds to providing birth control pills, because the employer has their own standards that the employee must agree to when they sign a contract; if the organization decides that they will provide birth control pills, then obviously all employees must adhere to that. However, for a self-employed pharmacist, it's not that clear-cut imo. These large chains that have pharmacies in them (Rite-Aid, Eckert, Duane Reade etc.) don't tend to set up shop in rural Alabama.
The argument about refusing service to minorities strikes me initially as not comparable or relevant, though I'm not about to take the time to think about why. Just my initial impression of that line of reasoning.
