Absolutely, assuming he refused to fill it for anyone and did not target certain people or groups.
I thought this was self-evident, but abortion is accorded a special status in the law, relative to other medical procedures. Think of legislation involving federal funding for medical care, much of which specifically prohibits funding for abortions, and yet has never (to my knowledge) been subject to equal protection challenges.
Of course.
Or Rogain, or freakin’ epsom salts, if he wanted.
Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980).
Successful equal protection challenges.
Dude, I gotta part with you on the salts,THAT is over the limit.
I guess I would say that doctors are critical links in the health delivery chain and most people seem to think that they should be allowed to refuse to perform an abortion if that is what their conscience demands and frankly there is a much bigger access problem with abortion than there is with birth control pills. In fact noone here seems to have made an argument that a doctor must prescribe a birth conrtol pill if their conscience demands otherwise. Why do we think that a pharmacist must fill a birth control prescription if their conscience demands that they do not? What is so different about doctors that makes this distinction possible?
Merely having a license doesn’t mean that you put your morals and principles aside. I may think your morals and principles are stupid but I don’t think we are in the business of coercing people to sell things they don’t want to sell.
Two reasons - one is that an abortion is different than contraception, and about half this debate just seems to be about contraception. Pharmacists that deny contraception aren’t keeping their hands free of the blood of babies. They’re just trying to punish or dissuade other people’s behavior that conflicts with their own religious beliefs. To the degree that their position is endorsed and protected by government liscence I see this as a direct and explicit violation of the first amendment - it’s not about what the pharmacist is doing, it’s about him using his position to meddle in other people’s beliefs. Hang the bastard.
The other reason is, the doctor actually does the deed. The pharmacist is merely selling the tool. I see a distinction here - I don’t want a hardware guy in retail to refuse to sell me an axe because he thinks I might go all Lizzie Borden with it. If I do, it’s not his fault - and so it’s not his responsibility.
I agree these are the two issues that we are discussing. I disagree that anything is near settled. The current state of the law may be that employees must do as the employer says even if it conflicts with their religious beliefs or get fired but I am not as sure as you are that this is a constitutionally defensible position. I would guess that the ACLU has a different take on this. I don’t know that you can force a private pharmacist to stock birth control pills even if there isn’t another pharmacy for a hundred miles (although the fact that birth control pills have therapeutic value might make the public policy concern strong enough to force pharmacists to stock it I would like to know if the only doctor capable of performing an abortion for a hundred miles would be forced to perform an abortion with therapeutic value, or if we would even force that doctor to prescribe birth control pills).
I think the ACLU might disagree with your position and I probably do as well. I don’t agree with the notion of refusing to dispense birth control pills because of a religious conviction, but that’s mostly because I think its a stupid not because I don’t think that there isn’t a first amendment right to exercise that refusal. I think you are probably trampling on the first amendment and that might be OK with you but the first amendment is just too important to me to shove aside without some evidence that people are really having trouble getting birth control pills.
Can you provide some cites that people are having significant trouble getting birth control pills or is it simply an odd case here and there?
Doctors with personal convictions which prevent them from prescribing birth control don’t become gynecologists, obstetricians or general practitioners; women who want birth control don’t ask their chiropractor or radiologist to prescribe them.
The First Amendment prevents governments from infringing on individual rights. It doesn’t apply to employers, landlords, business owners, or anyone else in a similar position to infringe on your rights.
As I have already pointed out, it doesn’t matter if there are five of these cases or five million. Laws have to apply to everyone equally.
This one is pretty near settled - even Bricker comes down on the side that the employee should do his job or be unsurprised by the pink slip.
From a constitutional perspective it probably comes down to the fact that nobody is forcing the pharmacist to work at the non-anti-contraceptive/abortifactent pharmacy. Thus it’s left to local law, which may -or may not- speak to the subject one way or the other.
But why does their faith and values trump others?
Their values may say any form of birth control is wrong, and they are entitled to hold that opinion. I on the other hand may feel that having a child I can’t afford or just don’t want is just as valid, yet some are happy to promote one set of values at the expense of mine.
This represents further trivialization of the debate, in keeping with your previous idiotic comparisons between rendering health care and providing DVDs or liquor.
Contraception can be critically important for women at high risk in the event of pregnancy. And perhaps you missed this on the multiple previous occasions that it has been mentioned in this thread, but oral contraceptive/emergency contraceptive medication is prescribed for a wide variety of non-contraceptive purposes, including tumor chemotherapy. This alleged 'right to refuse" to fill a contraception medication collides head-on with compelling health interests that go way beyond not wanting to bear children.
Incidentally, Viagra is being tested against pulmonary hypertension and infertility in women.
Life is so very complicated for the “Jesus tells me what to dispense” pharmacist. How to tell whether you’re just punishing sinful sexually active women and men, or denying them potentially life-saving medication for conditions unrelated to sexual activity?
But that’s the way the first amendment works. The right is there unless there is some good reason to truncate that right. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre and you can’t smoke weed even if you are a rastafarian.
The question is whether the government can force privately owned pharmacies to stock and sell birth control pills (considering that noone has made a good case for the lack of access to birth control pills); and whether a private employer can fire a pharmacist for failing to dispense birth control pills. The constitution treats government action differently from private action and there is probably a much better case for the privately owned fundamentalist pharmacy owner than there is for the fundamentalist phramcist working at Walgreens but I’d bet the employment loawyers at Walgreens would think long and hard before they fired that pharmacist for failing to dispense birth control pills.
I can’t tell for sure, but I think you are misunderstanding the Catholic objection to contraception. It sounds like you think they want to withhold it because the woman might actually go and have sex with someone. Really the objection is (as far as I understand it) that taking steps to prevent conception during sex is contrary to God’s will, because one of the primary purposes of sex is procreation. The pharmacist doesn’t care if the customer goes out and has sex with anyone: that’s not on the pharmacist’s conscience. But the pharmacist does not want to be an agent of contraception which he sees as a usurping of God’s will.
Maybe you get that, I just wanted to make sure it was clear that it’s not a case of trying to get someone else to conform to your own moral standards: it’s a case of tyring to adere to them youself.
And, to reiterate, I don’t think the reason behind the refusal to stock birth control necessarily matters anyway.
Oh.
Then McRae v. Mathews, 421 F. Supp. 533 (Eastern District New York 1976).
See my previous post: it has nothing to do with them being, or not being, “sinful sexually active women and men.” Could be a monogamous Jesus-loving married couple; doesn’t matter.
There could be an argument made for providing them for non-contraceptive uses; but since pharamcists don’t know the reason for the prescription – and even off-label use would have a contraceptive affect – it’s simpler just to not carry them at all.
Bastard.
I trust that my point has been made?
You don’t think its a bit silly to call a doctor that refuses to dispense birth control pills “discriminating”? To say no doctor is better than a doctor that won’t prescribe birth control pills is kind of like throwing out that half empty cup of water in a drought, isn’t it?
But its not discrimination. If it were then I would be right there with you but you are really stretching the meaning of the word discrimination here.
Well, that’s horrible but I think its a bit different don’t you? Isn’t the public policy rationale for requiring access for seeing eye dogs significantly more compelling than requiring pharmacists to stock and sell birth control pills? They may be equally distasteful to you but that doesn’t mean that the acts are equally impermissible. BTW I’m pretty liberal and I just don’t think the bill of rights should be applied in a results oriented way. It undercuts our civil liberties to say that we will enforce the first amendment when it helps our friends and we will ignore it when it helps our enemies. In much the same way that a liberal will defend the KKK’s right to march down main street (even whiole picketing them), I think we have to protect civil liberties even for our enemies because there may come a time when we regret having undercut them.