Only if he or she decides to take responsibility. I can see how pharmacists would object to dispensing drugs in either situation, and I fully support them being able to do so. It’s not a crime to refuse to dispense. The bar for forcing people to do something against their moral compass should be exceedingly high.
But they should have no additional legal protections if they choose to do so. Their job security isn’t guaranteed just because they are taking a moral stand.
I don’t know the current law but this is what “feels right” to me:
-Pharmacists “serving the public”, specifically that operate in a storefront to which the public has general access, should be required to fulfill any valid prescription unless they have some professional reason to not fulfill it (i.e. in their opinion as a pharmacist they believe it will cause harm or they suspect it was forged etc.) However, I think a pharmacy should have the right to decline to stock certain products, so if they do not want to carry morning after pills, regular birth control or similar products they should be allowed to decline to stock those products. But anything they stock, they must issue.
So if the pharmacy owner decides to carry those products, an individual pharmacist should be required, if they are serving the public, to fill those prescriptions.
-Pharmacists who do not serve the public should be allowed to engage in business on whatever terms they want however they want. So if you’re a compounding pharmacy you get full discretion in what you create there, and who you sign supply agreements with and who you fill orders for–a lot of compounding pharmacies are not open to the public.
If they cannot do their job due to a moral quagmire (for themselves, not the patient) then they are in the wrong profession.
IOW - they are trying to impart their morals onto others - they are no more ‘responsible’ for the actions of the patient than anyone else - if they see patterns of abuse, they have channels to report that - this is not that case.
First let me say that I am sorry that you live in a country with such medieval and outlying practices as killing criminals.
Beyond that I would say that Medical Personnel should be protected from being forced to be involved in practices that do not use medication or other intervention for positive therapeutic purposes. Many countries have conscience clauses for such personnel to exclude them from prescribing abortifacients even though termination of pregnancy is legal. IMHO such provisions should also apply to supplying the state with instruments of torture (Capital Punishment is universally held to be inhumane and effective torture by almost all Western Civilised countries.)
If the US does not allow its medical personnel to insist on their expertise being limited to positive intervention, then that is important to the individual’s freedom and a limitation on such Freedom, but falls into insignificance against the background of the question- judicial killing.
One would assume then that you would support Medical Staff in Nazi Germany being assigned to work in death camps?
Or they are working for the wrong employers. If they can find someone who supports the same moral stance (by refusing to stock whatever drug they dislike) then they are all set. Or if their bosses allow them to refuse to fill a particular script for personal reasons. I wouldn’t patronize that pharmacy but others might.
And before Godwin’s Law is quoted ate me (inaccurately in this case as it IS directly comparable)- how about forcing medics to take part in amputations, blindings, acid throwing in faces and so on under Shariah Law- is that not open to moral repugnance?
And how about mandating health care workers to take part in torture? Is that not open to some sort of relief?
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
As a principle, I think all women should have access to safe, legal abortion. As a principle, I think the state should not be executing people. As a principle, I think business owners should be able to do what they want with their property. When these principles are in conflict, I need someway to sort them into a hierarchy to determine which principle has to give way. What other metric should I use, other than “What has the best outcome for society as a whole?”
You would assume wrong - and you know it - a pharmacist - while ‘part of’ the process is only involved in dispensing the medications - and assuring the quality thereof - they are not part of the ‘treatment process’ itself.
ANd its a serious cliff to go from ‘not responsible for the patients actions’ to ‘participating in death camps’ - I find your comment offensive and slanderous.
You’re off on a serious tangent here - and they are not comparable to the problem being discussed at all.
agreed -
I believe you are misreading Bricker, who thinks I’m failing to reason from principle. I disagree, and explained my rationale in my response to him.
I think it’s interesting, and I’m not sure what it means, that no one (but me, apparently) sees a moral or ethical distinction between preparing the coctail for a lethal injection exection versus provide a morning-after pill for a woman who fears a pregnancy. Or not enough of a distinction to consider revising the codes under which they work.
Depends on your view of the DP in that case I guess - I am limiting my comments to the role of the pharmacist - not to the actions of the person requesting the item(s). In otherwords, I do not see a moral requirement for the pharmacist to ask “what are you using this for” unless the patient has a question or there is a legitimate medical need for the answer (to prevent an interaction with something already prescribed).
Denying a woman access to birth control (and yes, that’s what abortion is) is an act of bigotry and aggression. Providing the state with poison to kill someone is also an act of aggression. And both undercut trust and respect of the profession; if someone is willing to forbid a woman contraception to “punish the slut”, why wouldn’t they be willing to quietly replace an AIDS patients antiviral drugs with something that doesn’t work to punish them? They’ve already demonstrated that what matters to them is their bigotry, not their profession.
People in a medical profession shouldn’t use their position to harm people; it undercuts the trust that lets the institution of medicine function. Therefore, pharmacists should neither provide poison to kill the victims of the death penalty, nor should they be allowed to torment women because some book of Iron Age mythology tells them to.
If they sell the drug, then they should sell it to every valid customer. Its not the job of the pharmacist to decide how the drug is used (unless illegally) after it has been sold.
None of this is directly answerable to the question and seems to be intentionally inflammatory. Don’t do it again. There are plenty of ways to express opinions - even strong ones - that don’t require Nazis or the spectre of religious stigma.
Warning issued.
So you’re seriously equating prescribing contraceptives and drugs for pregnancy termination, legal execution by painless means, and fanatics blinding people with acid-throwing?*
Bizarre.
*It is not germane to the topic under discussion, but I seriously doubt acid-throwing in enshrined in Shariah law, as objectionable as such laws are in many circumstances.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. If CVS decides to stop selling BC pills, I will stop shopping there even if I’m not in the market for BC pills. If CVS decides to stop selling an execution drug (yeah, I know CVS isn’t the pharmacy of choice for execution drugs), I will approve and tend to shop there. If an individual pharmacist gets a legitimate prescription, one that their company is okay with, I think that pharmacist should dispense it.
If we claim that everything is all about the market, the market needs the information to make the decision.
Probably because most of those posting in this thread are focusing on the propriety or impropriety of acting on a conscientious objection, not on what is being objected.
Myself I echo Martin Hyde’s post. Especially I point again to how he brings up that “compounding pharmacies” are not necessarily the same as dispensing pharmacies, though a particular pharmacy may be both. A compounding pharmacy that only does institutional supply can as a matter of corporate policy simply say “ComPharm Inc. will not supply the State Department of Corrections with the active ingredients of the execution cocktail as specified by the protocol” and that’s that.