Yes, because it’s liberal pharmacists that have pushed to get conscience laws passed so that they can refuse prescriptions and let women bleed to death.
Oh, I realize that the woman can just go to the pharmacy next door, which obviously exists and is obviously staffed by good conservative pharmacists who will put patient care as their first priority, so there’s never really any danger for any women anywhere.
So, Bricker, you decided last year to champion these laws. Do you have any problems with the idea now that it has been demonstrated in Idaho that these laws will be extended far beyond abortifacients and contraceptives? Or are you also just fine with pharmacists making moral judgements about who can and can’t have medication, based on their personal whims?
Perhaps it you read the law as quoted in post 260, much of your fears and concerns over a typical Conscious Clause law would disappear. It’s not as black and white as you might believe. Your fear of women bleeding to death is unfounded.
I guess if I’m going to use that canard I need to narrow it down somehow. I’m ardently pro-life, but I don’t regard the vast majority of pro-choice people as murderers in any meaningful sense. They, in good and honest faith, don’t regard a fetus as a human being. I think they’re incorrect, but that’s not an objectively provable point, and I absolutely understand that they’re arguing from what they believe. But equally obviously, plenty of other pro-life folks don’t see it that way.
So far, I am unaware of any actual problem with the existence of these laws. I am aware of plenty of speculation, but no actual instance of a problem I regard as serious.
They passed those laws to shield a movement that is motivated by the hatred of women. I no more believe any protestations of innocence on their part than I would believe such protestations on the part of someone supporting segregation.
Of course not; you clearly care nothing for the rights or welfare of women, so for you anything bad that happens to them isn’t a problem.
If you’d read the Conscious Clause laws, your fear of such absurd results would subside. The one I linked clearly provides for such exigent circumstances by requiring the professional to administer pending the arrival of non-objecting assistance.
So you don’t consider the Idaho case to be serious?
Despite the fact that it wasn’t a moral objection to the “procedure”, it was a moral objection to the person?
Despite the fact that this situation could have created a serious health risk to the woman if it had been in a more rural location?
Or are you just assuming that something like this would never happen in a rural location?
Or are you simply holding “free market” and “personal freedom” principals above all and denying that any health risk is “serious” if it contravenes those freedoms? In which case, you would have to agree that it is also OK for pharmacists to refuse prescriptions for AIDS patients or blacks or whatever, right? Anyone and anything that they decide is “immoral” at the time.
Serious questions, I’m trying to understand your thinking.
I can understand the argument for ‘conscientious objector’ status on abortion drugs and possibly even contraceptives. And I can also understand the “it’s my pharmacy, I’ll sell what I want to” idea. Just like I understand the “giving you a state license to a restricted arena means you don’t get to pick and choose”. I just haven’t made up my mind yet what my position is on the issue.
But, just as the arguments in the previous thread pushed you over the line to supporting these laws, the hypocrisy of saying “oh no, it’s fine in this circumstance that I agree with, and it’s not a problem because it would never happen in any other circumstance or any situation that would truly cause problems NA NA NA NA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” pushes me right back the other way.
No, that’s not absurd. Once any one can every one can, if they want. And here are a bunch. Please quote the parts which you feel make my objection an absurdity.
Not so. Like I suggested, looking at the particular law (linked in post 260) behind the Idaho case, you’ll see…
(4) No health care professional or employer of the health care professional shall be civilly, criminally or administratively liable for the health care professional declining to provide health care services that violate his or her conscience, except for life-threatening situations as provided for in subsection (6) of this section.
. . .
(6) If a health care professional invokes a conscience right in a life-threatening situation where no other health care professional capable of treating the emergency is available, such health care professional shall provide treatment and care until an alternate health care professional capable of treating the emergency is found.*
Your no one wants to, therefore no one is available argument fails.
Is a pharmacist capable of making a medical diagnosis to determine if the uterine bleeding that may result by denying the medicine will be life threatening to the woman?
What if it is merely seriously impacts her health but doesn’t actually kill her? Is that ok? What if (as a girlfriend I once had) was on birth control to manage her Endometriosis which was very painful. Since it is not life threatening it is ok to send her home to (literally…I saw it) writhe in pain?
Look at all the “safety measures” in Idaho’s version:
When you consider the fact that in large parts of Idaho pharmacies are few and far between, it is quite possible to effectively ban contraceptives in this manner.
Also, if this has everthing to do with personal morality and nothing to do with discrimination against women, why can’t I find any reports of pharmacists refusing to dispense Viagra or Cialis?
Yes so. You have yet to quote anything about how since anybody can deny medication, everybody can. The only objection you have provided does not say what you’re claiming it does.
The whole point of this is that pharmacists are not doctors. In point of fact determining the severity of a condition and diagnosing treatment would most likely land them afoul of practicing medicine without a license laws. Judging what is and is not a life-threatening condition is beyond a pharmacist’s job description.
They also don’t define “life threatening”, what they mean by no other health care professional being capable of treating the emergency, or what “treatment and care” they must provide. Is an ambulance service that can be called to collect someone sufficient? What if there’s another pharmacy that’s a two hour’s drive away, but the person in the pharmacy is unlikely to die before, oh, 24 hours pass. Can they be sent on their way? What sort of “treatment and care” must a pharmacist provide? It doesn’t say “provide the prescription that was ordered by the patient’s physician”, so that’s not even definite. Can they give you aspirin while refusing to fill your prescription that stops uterine bleeding?
And the statute you linked is hardly the only one. Can you cite and quote what provisions the other states with CC’s have that will protect doctors’ patients from pharmacists who simply don’t want to give them their legally prescribed medicines?
“Could have” been serious is not the same as “was serious,” is it? Yes, it could have been even more serious if the pharmacist had asserted that the law gave him the power to kill like an avenging angel, and he had lit a sword on fire and chased the frightened patient around the store.
But since that didn’t happen, I don’t regard it as serious.
“Rural?” Very possible.
But “rural” does not equal “place where no other source is reasonably available.”
I certainly appreciate your kind attempt to tell me what I would “have to” agree to, but inasmuch as I have not hired you as my spokesperson, I must ask that you stop trying to donate your services to the cause gratis. Really. It makes me feel beholden.
It should be obvious (and has long been codified into ethical standards and laws governing health care in modern society) that a patient’s rights and interests are paramount in the provision of health care. This viewpoint is expressed in all manner of responsibilities laid out for health care providers, including openness and portability of medical records, rules of physician conduct, the patient right to file complaints about poor or inappropriate treatment and so on. There is nothing revolutionary about this; it represents incremental gains made on behalf of patients over a long period. It should not come as a shock that the concept that patients’ interests are superior to those of pharmacists is viewed as self-evident.
No one is setting out “rules” or demanding that you post to the “peculiar” standards expected in Great Debates.
However, you derided another poster for having a strong opinion (which he had backed up with reasoned arguments), as is typical of GD, while having to that point posted virtually nothing yourself except a “ha-ha, a court agreed with me, so whaddaya think now, fools” and a couple of drive-by sneers at other posters, so you can expect to be called on it. Continue to weasel (or “wriggle desperately”, to use your own term), and your posts will be accorded the lack of respect they deserve.
To repeat redtail23’s question to you for a third time:
Add to that my earlier question about a pharmacist who would apparently be protected under “conscience” laws if he decided to withhold prescribed anti-retroviral medication from a patient who he thought might have contracted HIV through “immoral” means.
Are you and other “Conscience Pharmacist” boosters fine with that?
Yes. It is also possible for a pharmacist to decide that this law appoints him as God’s avenging archangel. But it doesn’t seem to have actually happened.
Perhaps because there are no non-fringe belief systems that might regard Viagra or Cialis as immoral.
People have pointed out what the laws involved actually say, and what behavior they actually allow. Your object “well… it hasn’t happened yet” is not persuasive or particularly relevant, but your “oh yeah, well someone could use this law to gun down a bus full of nuns!” is spectacularly transparent.
Come on Bricker, it’s not really your claim that someone could just as easily use this law to say that they won’t dispense legally prescribed medicine as it is that they would act as an “avenging archangel”. So why the schtick.
And yet fringe belief systems would still be protected.
“Hey, this new law says that you can kill anybody you want, but first you have to notify them in writing 30 days in advance, and chisel, yourself, a marble statute that is an identifiable likeness on a 1:1 scale, and sing a song.”
“That’s a horrible law!”
“I don’t see what you mean, our feelings about the laws aren’t relevant and it’s the will of the people anyways. Besides, it hasn’t happened yet and really, how many people are that good at carving marble?”