More sexually functional members of a religion usually results in MORE members of that religion. Its always been my belief that this was the logic behind almost every religious restriction on sexual behaviors.
Can’t marry outside the religion…might not have babies of religion X
Can have sex with someone who is not your spouse … because they might make members of another religion.
Cant have abortions or use birth control…fewer new members of the religion.
Just to clarify, I am not supporting this in any way. My opinion that pharmacists should be allowed to refuse to fill extends as far as handing the scrip to another pharmacist (out of the patient’s sight) and saying “Can you handle this one please”.
Anything else should be illegal and put the pharmacist at risk of losing their license.
I think (and hope) you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
And your line of argument is ignorant and wrong. The church, if you’re talking about the Catholic church, does INDEED have a stance on fertility treatments-they’re not allowed, same as birth control.
That’s rather strange, because fertility treatments, including but not limited to in vitro fertilization, involve fertilizing a greater number of eggs than the recipient intends to turn into children.
If this is being done by individual “renegade” pharmacists, then yes, I agree it is an outrage. And the story linked seems to indicate this is indeed the case - in most of the situations described. But it’s not entirely clear if that is what’s happening in all cases. It has been left open to speculation that refusals might be being made as a directive of the company’s management. Where this might be true (and again, I can’t say if it is, or isn’t), then your outrage holds no water. Companies are perfectly free to determine for themselves if they wish to sell birth control prescriptions - as long as they’re fulfilling the contracts they’ve negotiated with both the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies.
You might. I’m not sure this is as absolute as you make it out to be. It may depend on your contract with your employer, the position of corporate management on these issues (although I rather doubt a company with such strong reservation about the Iraq war would bother bidding on a such a contract), and whether there was ample other work to which your employer could assign you.
Or a Christian Scientist Emergency Room physician!
I agree with this (even though I think the pharmacists in question are being complete asses and if I knew any pharmacies that did this I’d never shop there). However, I think the pharmacists who don’t return prescriptions are guilty of theft.
In which case the straightforward answer is “this pharmacy doesn’t stock oral contraceptives.” (If they don’t intend to sell them, they surely don’t stock them. And a business with a stated policy of selling contraceptives to some people but not others - for instance, married women but not single women - might find itself in legal trouble.)
I think you misread me. I was referring to statutory protection, as indicated by the succeeding paragraphs of the OP.
(Bolding mine) But the church does have a stance on sex outside marriage: they’re agin it.
So, if pharmacist denying BC to women isn’t also demanding proof of marriage from men who request Viagra, the pharmacist is helping them violate the church’s edict.
A pharmacist is working for a private employer, but they are also acting as an agent of government in controlling access to drugs. Someone in another thread made a very good analogy: suppose a DMV employee was a Muslim who didn’t think women should be allowed to drive. Should they be allowed to refuse licensing women drivers, and keep their job?
These places need BIG signs in the front of their stores announcing their policies…so we, the ones who need this medication to handle a medical problem (like the ones stated), can know which ones to avoid (~or egg~).
If some dolt did this to me, there’d be a need for a special extraction team to remove my foot from his/her ass.
The belief that we should leave our personal identities behind when we clock in and assume our role as a worker for and representative of the Business seems problematic to me.
First, as the OP demonstrates, a lot of people just don’t buy into it, so before we start castigating people for breaking the rules, there are other meta-issues to be decided that will determine the boundaries for the argument. So far, it seems like quite a few people on this board agrees with the OP, but that doesn’t hold across the entire culture. There is a pretty severe difference in priorities that make a lot of arguments on both sides irrelevant to the other side.
Second, there have been huge scandals in the past about people making unethical decisions for the advancement of their business. There have definitely been problems when people leave their ethics behind for personal gain. I recognize that it’s a different scenario when the issue is selling a legal product to a willing customer, but this is a view that can be reasonably drawn somewhere down the line. To say that personal beliefs have no place in business is risky, and this seems to me to be the path that leads us there.
Finally, to tell the pharmacist that he/she has an obligation to respect the autonomy of others is an ethical decision that we seem to expect everyone to honor. It’s one I agree with, but I still understand it to be an ethical statement. If that’s so, then the issue is not that pharmacists are bringing ethics into business, but that they’re using ethics I don’t agree with. I think it’s important to recognize the distinction.
Hiebram
The Church makes no distinction between married and unmarried people using artificial birth control - no Catholic is supposed to use it.
But, I do agree that if a pharmacist is refusing to fill a birth control prescription without proof of being married should do the same for Viagra to be consistent.
Except, a DMV employee is, AFAIK, actually a direct employee of the government. The pharmacist is not.
Hmmm…fertility treatments was perhaps the wrong phrase. I should have said fertility drugs. IVF is indeed considered out of bounds by the Catholic Church. LTOT and GIFT are considered borderline and I believe the Church is still deciding on it. I think the consensus is that LTOT is going to be approved, but GIFT is going to remain controversial. Right now the Church leaves it up to the individual’s conscience - which is what they should do on more issues, IMO.
Only some are disallowed. Others are completely OK. Fertility drugs fall into the latter category.
Any pharmacist who does this is pretty unlikely to have his job/carreer/license put in jeopardy for the simple reason that there is a shortage of pharmacists nationwide (USA).
Supposing that the employer of the pharmacists objected to their behavior, they wouldn’t be likely to fill that vacant position in a timely manner if they terminated the employee. Regardless, that pharmacist would have many other career options open to him/her even if the employer did let them go.
Likewise, it seems people would be none too anxious to de-license qualified health professionals in a field where there is a shortage. Gross negligence, sure they’ll revoke a license.
Regardless of your view on the situation, these are practical aspects of it (as I see it).
That said, I think I’ll stay out of armchair-regulating/passing-judgment-on a career that I know very little about. Until they start telling me how they think I should do my job, anyway. 
As several people have pointed out, the church does have a stance on fertility treatments, and has for several years.
Also, here’s information on the Catholic church’s stance on sexual activity: What sexual activity is accepted? and Roman Catholic Church and Homosexuality. According to this, men and women should only have sex if they’re married, and, although the church has become slightly more lenient about it, still holds that sex is ethical only if there is a possibility for conception. In other words, they accept that sex does have a “unifying” effect in a marriage, but still hold that sex is primarily for procreation.
By the above definition, having sex for reasons other than having children is considered unethical by the church. So, if a man is taking viagra solely to enjoy the pleasure of sex, he’s committing what might be deemed a morally reprehensible act, at least by the definition of the Catholic church. Unless he’s having sex in order to be open to the possibility of having children with his wife, he should not be taking viagra - he doesn’t need it unless he’s trying to have a child with his wife. So, if you take this further, you could argue that a) a single man doesn’t need viagra because sex outside of marriage is fornication and therefore a sin, b) a man whose wife is no longer capable of having children does not need viagra because he can’t have sex outside of marriage, and if his wife can’t have kids, neither can he and c) a man who knows that he is sterile and incapable of having children doesn’t need viagra because if he were taking it only to have sex, then he’d be doing something unethical.
True, there is a difference between a private-sector pharmacist and a government employee.
But you have to go through a pharmacist to get a prescription filled – there is no alternative. A pharmacist who wanted to avoid personally providing the BC should be willing to return the prescription, so the customer could go to a pharmacist who had no such objections. If the pharmacist refuses to return the prescription, IMO he’s using his government license to legislate his religion.
Which brings up something I didn’t notice at first: if a woman seeking birth control is not Roman Catholic, why is the pharmacist appealing to the church’s rules? They don’t apply to her.
And I don’t see how any extant rules apply to the pharmacist’s act of providing the BC. (Correct me if I’m wrong – but any such rule would seem to require, e.g., that Roman Catholics divest themselves of any stock in pharmaceutical companies that manufacture BC).
As something of a Libertarian, I find it hard to think of a good reason why pharmacists should be forced to do something they think is wrong, however stupid I find that view. Then again, I also fully support the ability of a business to fire such a person, or customers to boycott said establishment if they don’t. While there is some recourse in the “professional standards” area, it makes more uncomfortable than the problem it is solving.
You are correct. The Church has a stance on fertility treatments. However, it is not universally against them (fertility drugs are OK) and none of their opposition has anything to do with messing with reproductive organs per se. For example, as RTFirefly notes, the Church’s main objection to IVF has to do with multiple eggs being fertilized and then having most of them destroyed because they are not needed.
From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Nope, because there’s also the unifying aspect. You can have sex whenever you want with your wife, as long as you’re not artificially blocking the possibility of conception. Viagra does not artificially block the possibility of conception, so you’re OK.
Eh? Nonsense. You don’t have to always be trying to have a child with your wife. The church has no problem with natural means of birth control.
Correct.
Bzzzt. You can still have sex within a marriage even if you can’t have kids. There’s always the unifying aspect.
Only by using the most tortured logic is this correct.
This isn’t quite true, actually: Catholic teaching holds that sex within marriage where one of the partners is unable to have children is perfectly all right if the couple doesn’t use artificial means to prevent conception. So there’s nothing unethical, from the Church’s POV, about a postmenopausal or otherwise infertile married couple having sex, with or without Viagra. The idea is that couples are supposed to be open to the possibility of conception, even if it’s only a hypothetical one, not that it’s the only permissible reason to have sex.
Thanks, Katisha, for the clarification. I appreciate it.