So if a soldier is asked to follow an order he finds “repugnant” is he supposed to obey it or not? I know they’re supposed to disobey illegal orders, and the request to provide a legal substance to the woman under the appropriate framework wasn’t quite the same as a soldier being asked to follow an illegal order, but since legal things can be wrong and wrong things can be legal, I’m not sure I can come down absolutely on either side of this one. Certainly he had no right to tell the woman she couldn’t have the medication. He is a pharmacist, not a doctor. I don’t think that is what was happening though. I think he was just refusing to be party to it based on his own moral code. I don’t recall hearing him rip the prescription from her hand and destroy it or telling her she had to have the baby. I feel he should be able to withdraw his own participation. All the impact it has on the customer is she has to find a different pharmacist to fill the order. If his moral code interferes with lots of business for the company, they may feel free to discipline or terminate him as appropriate, but if his overall performance is acceptable, leave that to the employer/employee to work out.
Kind of like a lawyer or judge recusing themselves from a particular case they feel they can’t treat fairly. Doesn’t mean they have to stop being a lawyer/judge, or even leave their current practice. Just means you have to find someone else in that particular case. Taking a job shouldn’t mean giving up autonomy. There are alternatives. He’s probably not even the only pharmacist in the store, let alone the area. I didn’t hear reports of him trying to impose his moral code on anyone but himself. He wasn’t trying to stop the woman from having the prescription filled in any process which didn’t directly involve him was he? If he was the senior pharmacist and he was refusing to do it himself and refusing to allow the junior pharmacists to do it either I could see a charge of imposing his morals. The article in the OP didn’t say anything about a lecture in morals, or other interference in the woman’s life. I personally see a difference between ‘This, I cannot do’ and ‘I won’t let you do this’. All the evidence in the article seems to indicate it was the former, not the latter.
In other news, Denton is now a suburb of Dallas? Since when is a 45-minute to an hour drive(38 miles) from downtown Dallas to “downtown” Denton an acceptable distance for a “suburb”? Are suburbs 40 miles from the urban area these days? That’s further from Dallas than Ft Worth is(32 miles). A commute from Denton to Dallas would take an hour and a half or more during rush hour. God help you if there was an accident on the major freeway between Dallas and Denton because you’d be in traffic two hours minimum.
How did the pharmacist even know she was a rape victim? Did she tell him? (Not that it matters one way or the other - she had a prescription for it and went to a pharmacy that carried it, and should have gotten it.) I just wonder why the emphasis on the fact that she was a rape victim, although it does make him look like even more of an asshole.
I also don’t understand how he can feel morally ok about being employed by this company if he really feels so strongly about this. He refuses to give out the pills himself, but feels ok with taking some of the money from the sale? Nice moral stand you’ve taken, there.
Mgtman, the pharmacist didn’t find someone else for her to give her the pills, he just refused to give them to her. If he had gotten another pharmacist to take over for him I don’t think this controversy would have happened. If he feels this way he should have made arrangements for this scenario beforehand with his boss or coworkers that he could discreetly get another tech to fill the prescription. He obviously knows they carry the pills, so there is no reason for him not to be prepared for someone to come in with a prescription for them, right? He also should not have let the woman know that he didn’t want to fill the prescription himself, he could have just told her to hold on a moment, then gotten someone else.
In other words, this “choice” stuff I hear so much about means you better be ready to assist in abortions, or you will get fired, and that no one has the right to interfere in this personal, private decision, unless they want to force you to go along with it.
In other words, any doctor who will not perform abortions must be forced to give up his license. Any one who will not drive a woman to the clinic must give up their driver’s licence.
So any time an employer asks you to do something you find immoral, your only two options are to go along without question, or quit. Is that the principle?
Sounds reasonable enough, but how many jobs are actually such good fits for individuals? Would it not be more appropriate to allow, as we do with lawyers and judges, the occasional recusal from certain duties as long as the overall job performance is good? I’m not sure. I can see this as being a shield for bigots not to have to deal with the objects of their bigotry in a professional setting, and I find that fairly unpaleteable. On the other hand, so many professions are cookie-cutter “other duties as assigned” that this kind of shopping around and finding the perfect job is pretty unrealistic. I think there should be the ability to occasionally step away from the chains of “professionalism” because ultimately each “professional” is still a human being and that should be respected. I don’t think “professional” should become a synonym for “automaton”(without autonomy, doing only what it is designed/programmed/instructed/etc to do with no motives or drives of its own).
Understanding, of course that “Just doing my job.” has been ruled an insufficient defense in a whole shwack of circumstances.
Sorry - I disagree. In theory, a pharmacist (or technician) can still perform their duties without dispensing items that they find morally wrong - they difer to a co-worker.
Obviously lecturing patients, or witnessing to rape victims is apalling, but from the article linked I didn’t see where this pharmacist did that (I’m not saying he didn’t, I’m just saying it doesn’t read explicitly that way in the article).
The MAP should be available to all who want it - I just don’t think that EVERY pharmacist has to provide it in order to still be effective at their job. This is in theory of course.
I’m assuming that the pharmacist in question not only refused to fill the Rx, but also neglected to refer to a colleague who would provide it, causing increased stress and pain to the woman. That is, of course, totally unacceptable.
Are you actually comparing the two situations? He worked in a pharmacy. As far as I remember, there is precious little in a pharmacy which may require emergency decision making or taking fire. His job is to dispense medications. If he is unable to do so because he finds them “repugnant”, he should go somewhere else to work, like, as several people have suggested, Wal-Mart.
Horse puckey. Would he suddenly be unable to count pills correctly? He must avert his eyes from the hated bottle? No. Nothing was impeding him from doing his job correctly. He’s acted like someone who’s taken a bartending job but refuses to pour alcohol because of moral concerns.
Taking a job DOES mean giving up a certain amount of autonomy. In particular, when you are scheduled to work, you work or make some other arrangements (sick days, vacation, what have you). Sure, you’ve got a choice about it. But it’s not like Eckerd’s is asking him something that wasn’t in the damn job description, is it?
Anyway, it didn’t seem that she was able to get another pharmacist in the store to fill it, as she had to go to a Walgreen’s.
Shodan, that arguement doesn’t even make any sense. Hell, I don’t even know why I’m responding to it.
Being pro-choice, in my view, absolutely means that you have to accept and allow others to feel very strongly that abortion is wrong. (That’s one of the choices, right?) It is personally quite acceptable to me that this pharmacist has his own views and wishes to direct his professional life accordingly.
However, he has incorrectly and inappropriately acted in this case. He chose to work as a pharmacist. Fine. He chose to work for Eckerds. Fine. He chose to continue to work there even after Eckerds began carrying MAP. Iffy, but still fine. But then he chose to express his opposition to the availability of MAP by refusing to dispense it to a customer at that pharmacy. Wrong.
It would also be wrong for me, as a secretary, to get a job working for the Archidocese of Chicago, knowing the Catholic churches views on abortion, and refuse to complete any projects related to that stance.
I would also expect that if a pharmacist is a $cientologist, that he not work at my local Walgreen’s and refuse to dispense me my anti-depressants. He’s free to believe whatever he wants. But he’s not free, as a representative of Walgreen’s, to refuse to give me my meds.
And, as others have stated, this man could have chosen a series of different options so that he would not have had to go against his moral code in dispensing this medication. Including discussing it with his employer in order to have options at hand when the situation came up.
Yeah, this dichotomy bugs me too. Why isn’t this a simple matter for the employer and employee to work out amongst themselves? If the pharmacist is a good pharmacist but is unwilling to dispense certain medications, but the employer knows this and thinks the pharmacist is a good enough employee to make an accomodation for the pharmacist’s moral beliefs, why is that a terrible thing?
Not only did the pharmacist in question refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, he refused to transfer them to other pharmacies.
How it this possible? Once the customer handed him over the prescription he refused to hand it back to her? That’s nuts.
This is not anymore of an “abortion pill” than orthotricyclen or any other commonly used birth control pill is.
Of course it is.
The Pill prevents ovulation from happening to begin with. No egg, no fertilization. The morning after pill prevents implantation. The egg has already been fertilized before it even starts to implant. For those who believe that life begins at conception, it IS an abortion pill.
I don’t think the pharmacy can win either way on this one. If they fire him for acting on his beliefs, the pro-lifers get mad. If they kept him employed the pro-abortion camp would have shown up with pitchforks and torches. They’re screwed either way.
Why he couldn’t have just handed the damn script to another employee is beyond me. Chances are one of the others would have filled it.
This sounds like an arguement against absolute morals, not necessarially a comment about this individual case. For all we know he has done the math to see how much of his salary would come from such sales and he donates that percentage to charity(orphanages perhaps). Plus he may have had this job for years and years while the morning-after pill just recently became legal in the US, so this quandry wasn’t his to confront when he was first considering the job. When the regulations changed he would have had to weigh the possibility of this situation occurring versus changing jobs and going through the headache that implies. It isn’t always black and white and I’m unwilling to call him a hypocrite based on a two paragraph news article which didn’t even have a direct quote from anyone involved.
I’ve read the article in the OP and it didn’t seem to support the scenario you’re saying happened. I don’t know what actually happened. He may have actually had such arrangements and this was the one day someone called in sick and he was stuck. Perhaps he was very apologetic to the woman but was the only person in the store at the time. Perhaps he asked her to please come back on someone else’s shift, or if someone else had just stepped out and would be back in a few minutes. In any event, we don’t have enough evidence to say one way or the other, so judgements based on the facts in evidence are reasonably likely to be erroneous.
This whole situation reminds me of when my mother was working a second job as a telemarketer when I was in high school.
One of the projects she was assigned to work on involved calling people on behalf of a Christian organization’s “prayer line”. The wording of the script, which she was not allowed to deviate on, could lead a reasonable person to believe that if they gave money to this organization they would be better off with God.
Mom was very uncomfortable with this. She disagreed with it completely.
One option I guess she could have had - ala this pharmacist - would be to call the folks on her contact sheet and let them know when they answered that she was calling to pray for them and give them the opportunity to be blessed by the Lord via their donation. But because she was opposed to that sort of thing, she wasn’t going to. And then hang up, I guess.
Of course, this would have gotten her fired, and rightly so.
Instead, she talked about it with her supervisor. She let him know of her strong feelings about it. She asked to be put on a different project.
They said no.
She weighed her options and chose to stay at the job, anyway. In this case, her opposition to what she had to do did not outweigh her need to bring in extra income, and this was the best money she could make. She chose to stay. And at any time she had the power to leave. No one tied her to the chair.
This is the best analogy I’ve seen so far. As for Shodan and SnooopyFan’s strawmen about all doctors being forced to perform abortions, well, I already said they were strawmen. Thank gawd most of us are too smart to fall for that.
All the morning after pill is is a very strong dose of birth control pills. There is no difference at all between a birth control pill and the MAP, except strength of dose and how long you take it.
Some BCs work by suppressing ovulation. Some work by creating a “hostile environment” in the uterus such that a fertilized egg cannot implant. And that very type are being sold right now!!!
Example: A girl is on ortho and for whatever reason doesn’t take her pill for three days. She has sex, implantation occurs and the next morning takes three pills. Same result.
Is this an abortion? If you think yes, then I’d have to conclude that you are as morally opposed to ortho being available as you are the MAP or an 11th week abortion.
No, because performing abortions is not in every doctor’s job description. Believe it or not, doctors do have specialties, and not all doctors are trained to perform all procedures. No court would hold a podiatrist legally responsible to peform an abortion procedure he is not qualified to perform, just because “after all, he IS a doctor.” If a person doesn’t want to perform abortions, they don’t go into a field where they will be asked to perform abortions. It’s quite simple.
This is silly. The license to drive does not carry a mandatory itinerary that you must follow. It is the holder’s choice where to drive or not drive.
Of course not. The whole incident need never have happened. Assuming the pharmacist had the moral objection before he/she chose a career path, he/she could have originally sought a job where they didn’t carry morning after pills. Didn’t do that. Once employed at Eckerds, he/she could have made his/her moral concerns known to the employer before the situation ever arose. Didn’t do that either. Faced with the situation, he/she could have handed off the offending prescription to a colleague. Didn’t do that, apparently. Hell, once he/she felt the need to disobey company policy, the pharmacist could have said “I’m sorry, I can’t fill this, why don’t you try the Walgreen’s down the street?” without giving a reason why he/she couldn’t fill it, and deal with the job consequences later, without potentially humiliating the customer.
Instead, the fact that it’s known that the pharmacist refused to fill it on moral grounds implies to me that he/she did make that objection known to the customer. Now she’s upset, there are protesters on the doorstep, the employer is embarrassed, and the story is getting national attention. And the rape victim got the drug she needed anyway, as she could have with no fuss if the pharmacist hadn’t made decisions, step by step, that led to pushing his/her moral code on someone else’s choices.
If you KNOW that there’s an area of your job that you have a moral problem with, why would you choose to make the situation as bad as you possibly could, when there are in fact many ways to both follow your morals and peform your job?
I understand that we don’t know every detail of the story. I’ll point out though, that the pill has been legal since 1999 and 4 years is a long time for him to be stuck in this position. There are other pharmacies that he could work at that would not require him to be in this situation at all. If I felt that strongly about this issue I would certainly jump at any chance to work in a pharmacy that upheld the same moral beliefs I did. If it is a matter of working there or letting his family starve, he still could have handled the situation better.
The woman got the prescription filled at another pharmacy, which leads me to believe that she was turned away. If all he did was ask her to wait a few minutes while he got someone else she would not have known that he refused to give out these kinds of pills, she would have just thought she had to wait for some reason. Even if there was some kind of situation where he was the only person there then the blame is still on him and the pharmacy - he should have told his boss beforehand, ‘look I won’t give out these pills, someone else needs to be working with me at all times in case this happens.’ Since the man was disciplined for his actions I don’t see how that can mean he had such a prior arrangement with his boss.
I admit I may be making assumptions but I don’t feel like any of them are a stretch. Any story is only going to tell some of the details, so to read a news story and form an opinion without making any assumptions or value judgements at all would be nearly impossible. For your scenario to be true we would have to assume a lot more (that he gives the proceeds to charity, that he has no choice but to work there, that he was the only person working by accident and this scenario had never crossed his mind before, etc.) Of course, if those things were proven to be true, then yes, it would put a different spin on things somewhat, but I still maintain he should have planned for a situation like this.
Everybody seems to be ignoring this point right here. Again, I ask: What kind of moral option was this? Do you want her to give birth to her rapist’s child. I’m presuming the pharmacist may not have known she was raped. So…
Follow me now,
He thinks she’s being morally deficient (sleeping around and then taking morning after pills),
So he follows one tenet of the Bible by not giving her the pills,
But what about not judging? Or loving your neighbor? This is a very reprehensible thing he did, refusing to let her put aside what had happened to her. If every pharmacist decided to stand on his morals at this point…
This woman would now be having her rapist’s baby. How come none of you who think he was right are addressing that issue?
According to the full prescribing information for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, birth control pills work in three different ways. They do inhibit ovulation, if taken daily. They also thicken the cervical mucus, making it harder for sperm to enter the uterus. Finally, and most significantly for our discussion, they make the endometrial lining of the uterus hostile for implantation; if an egg is fertilized (after all, these things aren’t perfect and neither are the people using them), it can’t implant itself in the endometrium.
In any event, whether the woman was on contraception prior to being raped is a red herring. The point is, she was prescribed a drug that is legal in the United States and has been for the past four years. Whether the pharmacist should’ve asked someone else to fill the script is academic, also. He didn’t. He is now facing consequences. What’s so hard to understand about that?
Oh, and since this is now in the Pit:
SnoopyFan, get your nose out of your Bible and show some fucking compassion!
This is one of the biggest problems I have with devout christians. If you are going to live by the bible, live by all of it, not just whatever happens to suit you best in the situation you are in. Freakin hypocrites.