I think women are “certain people”. While the possibility exists, I haven’t yet heard of a story in which a man by himself was refused sale
I was not making that assumption (that they stock the product). I don’t know why they would stock a product they have no intention of selling.
If they stock it, presumably they sell it to someone; and if they sell it to someone, they ought to sell it to anyone with a prescription.
Have men been granted a sale, while women have not? If so you would have a case for discrimination.
So what? The Hippocratic Oath is a meaningless platitude. How many physicians revere Apollo and Panaceia?
The modern version doesn’t forbid either, incidentally, and in fact expressly contemplates both.
They’re not supposed to.
Thanks for this weak acknowledgement.
Still inadequately explained is your insistence that this represents a “stretch”.
Incorrect. As previously noted, according to the National Women’s Law Center seven states do not permit this sort of cherry-picking of what drugs are proper to dispense; four states do. The lack of explicit regulations on this score in other states does not signify that the body of law in those states agrees with you.
Right now in my state, Georgia, there is no law that we must dispense any drug. We have the full right to deny a prescription, for any and all reasons. Personally, I like this ability. There are plenty of times that I’ve refused to fill a script, normally for a controlled substance, but I would be totally against any law requiring me to fill scripts, if for nothing else, because of the documentation and paperwork that would be required when we had a legitimate reason to refuse a script.
One thing I would question though, is why the pharmacists in the OP even mentioned to the patients WHY they weren’t filling the script. Telling a patient you are not filling their BCP for religious reasons is pretty much trying to force your beliefs onto them. Almost every time that there was a script we did not want to fill, we just told the patient “Sorry, we don’t have this medication in stock”. This little statement almost always keeps any arguments from happening, while keeping us from having to fill a script.
This I would totally agree with. People today do not respect their pharmacist, and they do not understand that we know more about their medications then their doctor does, and almost any pharmacist who has worked for any length of time has saved at least one person from dying due to a doctor’s mistake on a prescription. It amazes me sometimes how people have more patience waiting in line at the local Mcdonalds during lunch time, then they do waiting for their script to be filled. I’ve had people drop their script off, and when I tell them it will be 15 minutes, they yell at me “What! All you have to do is pull a bottle off the shelf and slap a label on it, what takes so goddamn long?”…
This isn’t true, though. A lot of people say it about a lot of things, but it isn’t true. You can deny a prescription for no reason, but not for any reason. You cannot, for example, deny a prescription based on the race of the person seeking to fill that prescription.
I fully respect pharmacists - as licensed professionals I think they should have a (and I am sure that they do have) a strict code of ethics to practice their profession. I also think as licensed professionals they should accept reasonable conditions of said licensing from the government - one of which should be not to deny prescribed medication to a person for capricious reasons.
The examples from the OP weren’t stores that were as matter of policy simply not stocking the product. They were people who were knowingly defying their employer’s wishes by refusing to sell a stocked product. Clearly these guys were feeling pretty self-empowered by their beliefs and probably felt they had nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
ETA: Also, there’s no telling how many other pharmacists are more circumspect about blocking the distribution of contraceptions for religious reasons - if done properly it wouldn’t be reported.
Which is a good part of why I think that a pharmacist wouldn’t quit his job if the state told him to stock and sell contraceptives - he’s got a lot invested in his job.
No, I’m putting pharmacies at the need of carrying the drug most commonly prescribed to half the damn population. There is nothing more commonly prescribed to women than hormonal contraception. To characterize something that overwhelmingly common as “anything any client might need” is…disingenuous, at best.
Why would you make a separate trip to the pharmacy for stuff you can buy at other places? I can buy OTC pain pills, Preparation H, Kleenex, cough syrup, whatever else at the grocery store, or the gas station, or damn near any other store I’m going to already be at. It would be just plain silly for me to add a whole separate store to my itinerary unnecessarily, don’t you think?
…and they are free to choose what they compromise.
Totally agreed that contraceptives are extremely popular and are a bad example. However, you can see that things can be stretched.
I can, then, have a store that only carries all those meds you can buy at the petrol station (sans condoms) and forget about the pesky regulations.
After reading this thread I think that laws requiring pharmacists to dispense contraceptives or lose their license are actually not about public safety, and more about punishing those that disagree with particular ideologies. What makes it worse is that it is coming from two unrelated directions. One side is from the pro-choice ideology. Here I think the offense comes from the idea that someone would dare to restrict women’s inviolable right to absolute reproductive freedom. The other direction is from secularists and other militant atheists who wish to eradicate religion from the public sphere and are thus upset that someone is making a public decision based on religion.
I think the true nature of the objections, rather than the stated “public health concern” can be seen in the way in which it is argued that pharmacists that don’t dispense contraception should be blackballed from being pharmacists. First of all, since pharmacists are in short supply it is clear that simply removing those that refuse to dispense contraceptions is not going to add to the availability of contraceptions, as pharmacies that had these pharmacists will probably simply be closed or understaffed. That doesn’t really help anyone. Secondly there are a range of options that would allow both pharmacists to uphold their ethics and also allow women access to contraception. For instance:
- There are many pharmacies where dispensing contraceptives is not part of the job (ie: aged care facilities and the like). We could require that objecting pharmacists register their objections with the licensing body and then require that they only work in one of these positions
- We could allow pharmacists to follow their conscience generally in densely populated areas where there is a lot of access to contraceptives. We could also then identify particular low-population regions where pharmacists would be required to dispense contraceptives and insist that pharmacists that objected to contraceptives would not be qualified to work in those areas
- We could train shop staff in the dispensing of contraceptives, what drug interactions to look for, what safety concerns there were, ect, and allow them to dispense contraceptives so that the pharmacist didn’t have to. If they were dealing with only a small number of drugs with the view to ensuring public safety the training may not need to be too long, and a small course may cover all they need to know.
- If contraceptives are safe enough that it is possible to compel pharmacists to dispense them, perhaps they don’t need to be prescription drugs in the first place and can be sold over the counter.
These are just some of the possible compromise positions that none of the people supposedly concerned about public health have advanced. Even from a strictly pragmatic point of view I think these sorts of options are to be preferred because they both ensure that women get contraceptives and also that needed pharmacists aren’t removed from the health care system.
In general too I think that both the right to conscientious objection and the right to be allowed to work in jobs that you are otherwise qualified for are rights that the government should uphold wherever possible. To not uphold these rights will return us to the days of a McCarthy-esque state where people aren’t allowed to think differently to the state sponsored ideology. I don’t think that the government should be involved in blackballing people from professions they are qualified for simply because they have unpopular views that do not necessarily affect their competency to do their job or compromise public safety. I don’t think that refusing to dispense contraceptives, so long as it is done openly and honestly, is something that should disqualify someone from being a pharmacist.
You’re paying too much attention to Der Trihs. Most of us want these guys “blackballed” for precisely as long as they predjudiciously refuse to provide service for reasons unrelated to the job (religious reasons, in this case). Most of us would be perfectly happy to have them continue to work as soon as they relent and start providing the services that we expect of persons in their occupation. And at least some of us would expect that to happen immediately in most cases, if a law were made against blacklisting contraceptive purchases - I personally think that when the choice comes down to conscientious objection or employment in the career they spent years training at, the number of people who choose the former will be vanishingly few.
Firstly, I don’t think it could work as simply as that. If pharmacists were able to continue to work as soon as they relented, then what is to stop someone objecting to contraception as soon as someone with a script walks in wanting it filled, and then relenting as soon as they walk out? I don’t think that a pharmacist that would object would do so without knowing the law and the consequences. If it was simple to get re-instated that would probably lead to a lot of flouting of the law.
Secondly irrespective of whether they can be re-instated or not I don’t think it is just to put them in the situation of choosing between their ability to hold a job and their ethics. You might be right in that many pharmacists might cave in and give out contraceptions, but I don’t think we should force them to choose. There are other options that protect both pharmacists consciences and women’s access to contraceptions and I think we should implement one of them. To insist that pharmacists must choose when there are other options I think is a little vindictive.
Calculon.
I have to ask. Why do you keep mentioning condoms in a thread about dispensing prescription drugs? They have no similarity to hormonal birth control in any way that’s relevant to this thread. The reason refusal to dispense is such an issue is that the pill is a prescription item that you can only get from a licensed pharmacy, and the main reason people refuse to dispense them is that some nimrods have managed to convince themselves that it’s a potential abortifacient. None of those things apply to condoms–they’re OTC items available in grocery stores, gas stations, and vending machines in public restrooms, and no one has yet decided that selling them is akin to taking part in an abortion. So what gives?
And yes, you can open a store that sells only items you’d find in the health and beauty section of your local big box store and not bother with prescription medications. But good luck drumming up much business, as you’d only be selling things people could get more conveniently elsewhere.
Because he wants to distract from the fact that this issue is really about the religious persecution of women. If he admits that it is the rights of women being infringed, then the parallels between this and “No blacks or Irish allowed” become harder to ignore.
So if they felt it was against their religion to serve a black man, you’d support their right to refuse such a man his medicine, right? Or is it only women who are acceptable targets?
Choosing to serve some people or not is different to choosing to offer a service/product or not. Therefore your whole question has no bearing on the discussion.
In general there is nothing wrong with choosing to offer only particular services, even if the services that you offer have selective appeal. So for instance is a men’s clothing store discriminatory? Women need clothes too, and if a shop is going to sell things that men want to buy, shouldn’t they also sell things that women want to buy?
If a pharmacist was filling birth-control prescriptions for men (presuming they had them) and not for women, that would be a more relevant example. Just refusing to sell a product to everyone is not discriminating against people and therefore not the same as refusing a black man his medication.
Calculon.
I have no issues with someone who owns their own business deciding what is sold there and what isn’t.
I have less sympathy for those that willingly took a job that they knew would compromise their morality. Want to work for someone who requires you do fulfill a legal function that you find objectionable? Tough. Swallow your pride and do it anyway, quit and work for someone else that doesn’t, or don’t do it and be fired.
Garbage. They are forbidding women access to an important product, one aimed specifically at them and only them. It isn’t significantly different than refusing to serve someone according to race or nationality. It’s pure anti-woman bigotry.
So again, should we go after men’s clothing stores and the like? They are denying women to