So, according to your link, CVS does not dispense birth control? Or is it one pharmacist at one location?
The market can handle this. Tell CVS to keep a pharmacist on staff at all times who will dispense birth control. Or go to XYZ pharmacy who requires everyone to dispense or else get fired, federal funding be damned.
My gut feeling is this is just liberal fear. How many women are on some form of birth control in this country? What percentage of those are totally unable to get their script because of a pharmacist who won’t fill it?
It sounds like you have a figure in mind. Suppose you tell us how many women being denied birth control is acceptable to you? Can we applied that same logic to, say, gun control? Is there a percentage of the population that would be acceptable to deny the right to purchase a firearm?
That was just the first link that popped up; it’s not some one time thing.
Ah, the magic free market. And if there aren’t any pharmacies that offer birth control, or whatever how will the market solve such problems ? If pharmacies simply refuse to provide something on ideological grounds and are willing to eat the cost, how will the market solve that ? The free market fails to solve problems all the time.
And how many will be unable, if the anti-woman forces ( and that’s what this really is about ) get their way ? Many women find it difficult to impossible to get abortions, since there are so few places that dare provide them. What makes you think birth control isn’t next ? How many pharmacies will stock birth control pills when they start being burned out or having their staff murdered while the government looks the other way ?
I don’t get it. The right-wing fundamentalists claim they want to reduce the number of abortions, yet they also try very hard to limit women’s access to birth control, which prevent unwanted pregnancies that are then often terminated through abortion. Is that about the jist of it?
Basically, they simply expect abstinence to be the only form of birth control needed. And as far as married couples-alot of your fundies simply feel that people should be popping out as many kids as possible.
Yes. These are people who are consistently hostile to women, and regard them as breeders at best. They will support anything that hurts women and forces them to pump out more babies.
Crazy shit like this makes it difficult to take your arguments seriously. What pharmacies do you know of that have been burned or have staff murdered because they dispense birth control pills?
And, if that did happen, when did the government look the other way and implicitly condone the murder of a pharmacist who sold birth control pills?
I didn’t say they had. I was making the point of what could happen if they started a campaign against pharmacies like they have against people and facilities that provide abortions. Which I mentioned in the part you carefully avoided quoting.
And yes, refusing to pay a clinic for non-related services because they “force” their employee to dispense Plan B or OCs IS very different from not paying for Plan B or OC’s directly. It can mean the difference between keeping a clinic open and having to close it. Which, as Qadgop stated, is bad for healthcare.
And you (as are those who think it abortion) are wrong. Plan B is NOT a different beast. It is pharmacologically and functionally the EXACT same birth control as that found in Mirena, in several single-agent oral contraceptives, and multiple different types of combined oral contraceptives. It works in exactly the same ways as regular progestin-only oral contraceptives.
And it should be up to the owners (and the state board of pharmacy in which they reside) of any individual pharmacy to determine what products they will/will not sell/dispense. Not the federal government. IMO.
IMO, a pharmacist should be free, by law, to work for a company that respects that belief. Beyond that, I have no sympathy for him/her. If he works for a company which makes it clear that he/she must dispense OCs/Plan B as part of his daily job, he has (and should have) no legal recourse.
Is emergency contraception the only “legitimate” use for the “Plan B” drug? I recall that birth control pills have (or had) alternative applications for other conditions. If it has, that should pretty much settle the hash, because a prescription carries no testimony as to intent, and the pharmacist is not empowered to telepath. Not legally, anyway, privacy issues.
Sortof. Plan B, the active ingredient being levonorgestrel, is a high dose of the same drug used in several progestin-only oral contraceptives (OCs). Said drug can be used, usually in combination with an estrogen (ethinyl estradiol being the most common) to treat conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and several others.
However, the form/dose that Plan B is specifically marketed under is used only for emergency contraception, so far as I’ve ever encountered.
Further, your typical modern pharmacy graduate has the capability of GENERALLY intuiting the use of a drug for a specific purpose. In the case of Plan B, it’s almost invariably a given. In the case of single-agent progestin pills with instructions to take multiple pills at one go, separated by 12 hours, the same intent can be assumed. In the case of 1 pill a day birth control, it’s less easy (though again, single agent pills are less likely to be used for conditions other than birth control than combined OCs).
And privacy issues actually don’t come into play at all. When you give a pharmacist your prescription, they legally can inquire of you OR your physician as to what the medication in question is being used for if they feel it necessary in order to provide you with adequate medical care. HIPAA protects a pharmacist in such a case, as do most (if not all) state laws.
Not only that, if we refuse to stop carrying and dispensing these birth control methods, we will lose all federal funding, even for the VFC and CHDP programs. In California, that’d be a very big hit, as a large percentage of Planned Parenthood’s business is to children in low income families, which essentially means the administration is bitchlsapping the poor as well as women. Two for one! Score!
Any supposed right to federal funding is beside the point. The objective is to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Consider a poor single woman who goes to school and works. She’s earnestly struggling to better herself. Or similarly, a young married couple who don’t have much income. You could give these people birth control, and they will be able to delay parenthood until a more appropriate time in their lives. Or you could just exhort them to abstinence, and they’ll probably have babies.
For preventing unwanted pregnancy, which approach do you think works better?
I I don’t get it either, and I’m pro-life. Because I’d like to see fewer abortions, I’m happy that birth control is readily available (ftr, I don’t consider mifepristone birth control. Short of that, sure, put it in the hands of the people). It’s only logical: the fewer unwanted pregnancies, the fewer abortions performed. I’m not very religious, though, so I’m not compelled to believe it’s our duty to “go forth and multiple.”
You really should stop lecturing people about the market if you’re not going to bother to acquire even basic knowledge about market economics. Here’s somereadingfor you.
How’s the Flavor-ade over there in Freemarket-town?
So you’re saying that if pharmacies deliberately subvert the free market by refusing to sell a product for which there is a demand, the free market will handle it? How, exactly? The whole point here is that the pharmacies are not acting in their best (economic) interest. The free market doesn’t work when people deliberately don’t act in their own best interest.