Pharmacies and Prescriptions

I just read this article from the NY Times on the latest in the battle over whether or not pharmacies/pharmacists should have to fulfil a prescription for a morning-after pill. The highlighted battleground is now Illinois as Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich told pharmacists across Illinios to fulfil the prescriptions requested of them.

In some states, legislators are pushing laws that would explicitly grant pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense drugs related to contraception or abortion on moral grounds. Others want to require pharmacies to fill any legal prescription for birth control, much like Governor Blagojevich's emergency rule in Illinois, which requires pharmacies that stock the morning-after pill to dispense it without delay. And in some states, there are proposals or newly enacted laws to make the morning-after pill more accessible, by requiring hospitals to offer it to rape victims or allowing certain pharmacists to sell it without a prescription.

Some of the bills could become moot if the Food and Drug Administration approves the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sale by pharmacists, something advocates for women's reproductive rights and several Democratic senators have pressured the agency to do.

Maybe if the people who became pregnant had better sex education, they would not be in the position they find themselves in. And that is, of course, assuming that they were not raped or otherwise unvoluntarily impregnated. But W and Co. feel that people should not be having sex until they are married and feel that abstinence is the only sex-ed people need. Not even married, heterosexual, Christian couples should be seeking out these demonous devices, not even if a prophylactic should break and they cannot afford to have [another] chilid.

But it is not only W and the Repugs who want to limit the options of those seeking the morning-after pill.

Around the country, in at least 12 states, including Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, so-called conscience clause bills have been introduced, which would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives if they have moral or religious objections. Four states already have such laws applying specifically to pharmacists: Arkansas, South Dakota, Mississippi and Georgia.

Proposals in three states - California, Missouri and New Jersey - would have the opposite effect, compelling pharmacies to fill any legal prescription.

In California, West Virginia and a few other states, there is a legislative tug of war, with both types of bills pending in the legislature. In Arizona last week, Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense such drugs.

On the federal level, bills requiring all legal prescriptions to be filled have been introduced in recent days by Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey. A House version of the Lautenberg bill has been sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney of New York and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida, both Democrats, and Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, among others. The bills are not expected to get very far.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, have introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, which would allow a pharmacist to refuse to dispense certain drugs as long as another pharmacist on duty would. [emphasis added by me]

Yes, you read that correctly. That guy who ran for the Presidency who said that even though he was personally against abortions, as President, he'd not allow the banning of abortions as that decision was a personal one. Fuck you, he just said. And aside Repug Santorum.

I'm appalled that Kerry would go and introduce this kind of action. And according to this dKos entry, Sen. Clinton (D-NY) is also backing the act.

But, for now, it is ultimately those behind the counter who have the real power and they have their own ethics to live by

As the debate grows among lawmakers, a quieter debate is taking place behind the counters of many drugstores.

"As far as being a health care professional, I don't think I should be injecting my moral values on other people," Rod Adams, a pharmacist at the Colorado Pharmacy in Denver, said in an interview last week. "Obviously a morning-after pill is a personal choice that someone has to make. They've already made that choice when they come in here, and I don't think - I'm not a counselor - I don't really think that's my job."

But Patty Levin, a pharmacist for 22 years who works at Wender & Roberts in the north Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, said that she had never been asked to fill a prescription for the morning-after pill.

"I would be opposed to dispensing that particular product," she said. "It's basically an early abortion, is basically what it is. I would just hand it to the other pharmacist here," she said, adding, "If I'm not filling it, it doesn't involve me."

But it does involve you Ms. Levin! By allowing that person to have their prescription filled, you've helped them. It seems to me that Ms. Levin is on the fence, but leaning towards an individual's right to request a medicine and to have that request fulfilled.

I haven't seen Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) come out and speak to this yet. Sen. Obama hasn't been the beacon of light I hoped he'd turn out to be after the election. But he still has plenty of time to be all I thought he would become.

Comments

[acm]

I presume that the key factor in Kerry/Clinton support is that this *requires that there be another pharmacist available* before the pharmacist can opt out. This would actually be a protection for many, especially those in small towns, where there is just one pharmacy counter with just one person there at a time.

This is why Senator makes a poor platform for a Presidential run -- you make a million votes on cutting-your-losses measures like this (e.g., the Repubs will pass a much nastier version unless you can get this "compromise" through), each of which can later be used to hang you when the context is long lost...

Just another penny for the pond

[dragonballyee]

I just don't see why Kerry is introducing a bill like this. A pharmacist's job is to prescribe drugs, no?

[Heil Mary]

Brauer has murderous misogynist pro-pedophile priest Munchausen by Proxy pyschosis. My Catholic Munchausen mom burned my skin off when I was 6 so I'd be a walking bill board against marital sex. Brauer and my mom aim to kick wives out of their marriage beds for any sex except breeding fresh altar boys and girls for ped priests and playboy adulterer Randall Terry who has a new half-age broodmare. Brauer and mom believe husbands should incest the kids or visit hookers like my dad. They believe priests and GOP politicians don't have enough illicit sex outlets and that all wives should be pagan sacrificed through deadly and disfiguring childbirth to accomodate their Catholic HERESY!
Brauer should be investigated for tampering with customers' prescriptions--I wouldn't put it past that mother killing bitch to have sold fake birth control pills and condoms with holes. Brauer is counting on your historical amnesia to overlook women's childbirth scourges--smelly, deadly bladder and bowel tears that force moms into adult diapers and divorce. Just as Viagra is touted for men's urinary health, contraception and abortion are essential for women in avoiding deadly vaginal childbirth, caesarian uterine ruptures, face and breast cancers caused by female fetuses, strokes, blindness, baldness, heart attacks, gangrene, and countless autoimmune diseases. Even with modern obstetrics, 30-50% of all American moms wear embarrassing Depends--just ask the jilted GOP First Wives Club! Birth control removes husbands' excuses for adultery and annulments. Birth control gives women potty parity with male Viagra users. But all Bitch Brauer and my mom care about is exploiting fetuses to explode other women's "naughty parts"! Brauer probably has Depends stock. She probably stinks from childbirth incontinence. Her creep husband probably molests their kids and visits hookers. More importantly, Brauer ignores anti-birth controller Pope Paul VI being a bonfide Nazi genocider of 500,000 Serbian non-Catholics in 1942. She ignores Jesus never condemning an RU-486-like Jerusalem weed that spared his women followers childbirth incontinence divorces. She ignores 450 other God-given abortifacients like coffee, tea, wine, tobacco, soy, ginger, and yucca. Brauer has given herself and others caffeine- and Consecrated wine-induced abortions. The Catholic Church knows pre-menopausal women expell embryos with most of their periods but goes ballistic when I insist they hold last rites and funeral masses for all those bloody, smelly tampons. There is no theological difference between surplus petri dish embryos and miscarried tampon embryos. By the Church's own standards, tampon embryos should be saved for reimplantation or proper burial just like petri dish embryos. You know Bitch Brauer flushes away her own tampon embryos! If I lived closer, I'd check her garbage for napkin "embryos" and stage media event funerals for her used napkins on her street and at her Catholic Church about her coffee abortions! I'd hire detectives to tail her cheating husband. Make the Brauers publicly accountable for all the eggs and sperm coming out of their putrid bodies! Tell the Brauer kids about their parents' "baby killing"! What goes around comes around!