I saw someone comment about using unhelpful language to describe them, but it wasn’t me. If I accused you of mischaracterizng people I don’t recall it.
Okay, I’ll buy that. What if the reason is “I just don’t want to” or “there’s not enough profit in that”? A licence permits you to sell drugs and regulates labeling and all of that; it doesn’t force you to sell anything. I know that’s what you’re arguing for: that the government should require all pharmacies to carry – all drugs? or just the most common ones? If you’re going to go that far, though, you might as well require all doctors to be general practitioners or all lawyers to practice family law. I don’t see the overwhelming public interest to force a pharmacy into that position.
Again, it’s not about the other person. The pharmacist is not trying to prevent them from acting immorally. The pharmacist is trying to avoid acting immorally himself by facilitating contraception.
Of course it’s not a suprise, but being forced to fulfill any prescription a customer comes in with would be a requirement that has not heretofore existed in the profession.
Presumably the regulation should be drafted in a manner that directly addresses the problem as efficiently as possible. I believe this is possible - and as I am arguing the principle, that is all I need to know. I don’t feel that I need to argue the details.
How do you know that they’re not motivated by a desire to force others to comply with their beliefs? It’s not exactly an unheard of motivation among religious people.
I’m not certain of this, but even if true: so what? I’m proposing changing things where necessary, so past precedent is only vaguely relevent and isn’t compelling.
“Whatever it likes” in the context of the discussion - ie., it should be able to not sell things.
That might be the case with regard to the pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions themselves and call somebody else over. It obviously isn’t in the case of those who refuse to fill the prescriptions and refuse to call somebody else over or transfer the prescription out.
Pharmacists have not historically been expected to fill any legal prescription a customer gives them, assuming they stock the product?
But it is written strongly into the law in a very counter-textualist fashion, isn’t it?
And, while not quite as strongly, but pretty strongly none the less “Citizens, thou shalt not discriminate based on sex” is in there too. And it is very hard to argue that refusing to sell prescription contraceptives doesn’t have a dramatically disparate impact at bare minimum (even if we don’t go down Der Trihs’ path that it is intended to discriminate) on women.
After all, contraceptives are prescribed for purposes other than contraception, but only to women as far as I know - such actions therefore only prevent women from receiving medication which may be necessary to their wellbeing or at the very least their comfort.
“Citizens, thou shalt not discriminate based on sex” → refusing to sell prescription contraceptives has a dramatically disparate impact → refusing to sell prescription contraceptives impermissibly discriminates base don sex
The second part as to the disparate impact is simply applying standard disparate impact case law to the situation. I assume you aren’t disputing this action predominantly impacts women?
The third part is, I presume, where you are looking for case law back up…
Nope - don’t have any. That wasn’t the argument I was trying to make. You were discussing why in your opinion laws preventing a pharmacist picking based on race were good public policy, and those preventing them picking based on their religious view of the product were bad public policy, and you commented that the reason was we have a strong legal bias against discrimination based on race.
Now, I simply extrapolated from that - given that there is a strong legal bias against discrimination based on sex, and given that this does have a disparate impact on women (which I am sure you won’t deny), why wouldn’t it, under your logic, be good public policy to prevent this?
Well, whoop-te-do, forbidding racial discrimination wasn’t against the law either in the past; that didn’t make it right. All your argument is, is an argument for changing the law not for pharmacists who discriminate against women being allowed to get away with it.
No. But on the other hand, if doctors are on staff at a hospital emergency department and someone needs urgent emergency care, that E.R. is obligated to provide it, and to have procedures set up for transporting patients to larger centers if need be. That obligation is set down in law.
Hospitals cannot say “we’ll treat or not treat whomever we want, depending on their ability to pay or whatever criteria we decide upon”.
It is not a gargantuan stretch to say that pharmacies licensed and regulated by the state must provide a certain level of service or have provisions in place to get that service to patients in need (i.e. emergency contraception).
I see that Bricker continues to not acknowledge that pharmacies already are constrained by a long list of reasonable rules and regulations to protect the public welfare, and has not explained why a provision mandating the filling of legally obtained prescriptions (or ensuring their availability to patients in poorly served areas) is so radical a departure from the long-standing regulatory climate affecting pharmacies.
There hasn’t been a need to explicitly spell this out, prior to the emergence of the “Jesus tells me what to dispense” pharmacist. But guess what? Now there’s a need.
While there might be a moral duty to rescue, I do not believe there is a legal duty to rescue for doctors or anyone else (you could literally watch a baby crawl between your legs off a pier into a lake and you don’t have to do anything to stop it even if it would require almost no offort on your part). I doubt there is even an ethical duty to rescue.
I get the feeling that people think pharmacists are little more than glorified cashiers. Becoming a pharmacist takes 6 years and most of pharmacists have doctorates these days.
Even if there were a duty to rescue, there is a vast difference between forcing a pharmacist to dispense antibiotics and forcing them to dispense a lifestyle drug (unless the birth control pills are being used therapeutically). With that said, if anyone can point to a single town where you can’t get birth control pills because the only pharmacist in town refuses to dispense them then please let me know. As far as I can tell, this is usually used as a stalking horse argument to support forcing doctors to perform elective abortions.
Can you name a single town where the only available pharmacist in town refuses to dispense birth control pills? I know that this may be the case for abortions but I haven’t heard of this being a REAL issue outside of the minds of people trying to make an argument for forcing doctors to perform abortions.
Well, there is the obvious defense that it isn’t the pharmacist’s fault that there are no oral contraceptives available for men, since presumably he’d refuse to offer those, too.
I think the notion is that if people were really looking at going out of business, they will choose to compromise their beliefs before they compromise their lifestyle.
That may be the case for therapeutic uses of birth control pills, I don’t think the logic holds for using birth control pills as a contraceptice. I think birth control pills are one of the greatest and most liberating development for women’s independence in recent history and I think people who refuse to dispense birth control pills are idiots but I think that they have a right to refuse to sell birth control piulls for recreational use as well as the right to be idiots.
OK so should we force an obstetrician who knows how to perform an abortion to perform them on demand? BTW abortion and euthanasia are the only two procedures that the hypocratic oath seems to expressly forbid.