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Growing Trend: Pharmacies refusing to stock/sell contraceptives
 MSNBC.com |
New Va. pharmacy won?t sell any contraceptives
CHANTILLY, Va. - A new drug store at a Virginia strip mall is putting its faith in an unconventional business plan: No candy. No sodas. And no birth control.
Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy is among at least seven pharmacies across the nation that are refusing as a matter of faith to sell contraceptives of any kind, even if a person has a prescription. States across the country have been wrestling with the issue of pharmacists who refuse on religious grounds to dispense birth control or morning-after pills, and some have enacted laws requiring drug stores to fill the prescriptions.
In Virginia, though, pharmacists can turn away any prescription for any reason.
?I am grateful to be able to practice,? pharmacy manager Robert Semler said, ?where my conscience will never be violated and my faith does not have to be checked at the door each morning.?
Semler ran a similar pharmacy before opening the new store, which is not far from Dulles International Airport. The store only sells items that are health-related, including vitamins, skin care products and over-the-counter medications.
On Tuesday, the pharmacy celebrated a blessing from Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde. While Divine Mercy Care is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, it is guided by church teachings on sexuality, which forbid any form of artificial contraception, including morning-after pills, condoms and birth control pills, a common prescription used by millions of women in the U.S.
?This pharmacy is a vibrant example of our Holy Father?s charge to all of us to wear our faith in the public square,? said Loverde, who sprinkled holy water on the shelves stocked with painkillers and acne treatments. ?It will allow families to shop in an environment where their faith is not compromised.?
Drawing scorn
The
drug store is the seventh in the country to be certified as not
prescribing birth control by Pharmacists for Life International. The
anti-abortion group estimates that perhaps hundreds of other pharmacies
have similar policies, though they have not been certified.
Earlier this year in Wisconsin, a state appeals court upheld sanctions against a pharmacist who refused to dispense birth control pills to a woman and wouldn?t transfer her prescription elsewhere. Elsewhere, at least seven states require pharmacies or pharmacists to fill contraceptive prescriptions, according to the National Women?s Law Center. Four states explicitly give pharmacists the right to turn away any prescriptions, the group said.
The Virginia store?s policy has drawn scorn from some abortion rights groups, who have already called for a boycott and collected more than 1,000 signatures protesting the pharmacy.
?If this emboldens other pharmacies in other parts of the state, it could really affect low-income and rural women in terms of access,? said Tarina Keene, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League.
Robert Laird, executive director of Divine Mercy Care, believes many of the estimated 50,000 Catholics within a few miles of the store will support its mission and make up for the roughly 10 percent of business that contraceptives represent in a typical pharmacy.
Whether Catholics will be drawn to the pharmacy is uncertain. According to a Gallup poll published last year for an extensive study of U.S. Catholicism called American Catholics Today, 75 percent of U.S. Catholics said you can still be a good Catholic even if you don?t obey church teachings on birth control.
Catherine Muskett said she plans to shop at the drug store even though she lives more than 20 miles away.
?Obviously it?s good to support pro-life causes. Every little bit counts,? said Muskett, one of about 75 people who crowded into the tiny shop for Tuesday?s ceremony.
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Sometimes I have to shake my head at the absurdity in this country. No one has a right to own a pharmacy. No one has a right to be a pharmacist. You have to pass state licensing requirements for both. I think if you refuse to carry certain prescriptions for reasons that are not related to medical science than you should lose your license. I realize that this is not a popular opinion, but I don't think anyone has the right to play God with medicine.
Re: Growing Trend: Pharmacies refusing to stock/sell contraceptives
This kind of S..T really gets me mad! I agree with you LMW - since when did pharmacists get to decide what medications someone can and can not take. Shouldn't their doctor decide????
This is why I donate a fair amount of money to NARAL and PP!
I hate this argument. Perhaps you should have chosen a different career.
I'm one of the few liberals that supports a pharmacist's right to refuse so long as someone else can fill the prescription asap, but I absolutely do not support a pharmacy's right to refuse.
Businesses do not have religious rights.
Explain to me how this works. Someone else at that pharmacy? Don't many pharmacies only have one pharmacist and the rest are techs. What about in small cities/towns or rural areas?
That is too slippery of a slope. Ane I agree with LMW - where would it stop? What if they believe HIV/AIDS is God's will or cancer? Or STD's?
It is interesting that people think this is OK but a physician just got in big trouble for refusing IVF to a gay couple.
Slippery slope.
On the other side, many pharmacies don't take medi-cal, either. Or they don't stock opiate-deriviative drugs due to risk of theft/break-ins.
But see, I think this is a much more logical reason than simply "my god says this pill is wrong."
AHHHH!!! ?This is right down the street from me (okay, maybe it's 10 miles, but you get the gist). ?We almost bought a house in Chantilly!
I totally agree with everyone except ESF. ?I'm a vegetarian. ?Guess I won't be working at a deli counter, saying I'll only serve the cheese. ?NO. ??
ETA: The only reason I think this is mildly acceptable is because it's an entire establishment of stupid. ?At least it's not a Target or something. ?And it should NEVER happen in small towns.?
Do you find the same people saying that a doctor should refuse to treat IVF but that a pharmacist shouldn't refuse to give BCP? I've seen both arguments, but not from the same person.
Dispensing medication, guaranteeing it's safe, etc. is the job. You don't get to pick and choose. If I worked at Target in clothing, I wouldn't have the right to refuse to sell clothes that I thought were too immodest for little girls (or those horrible padded bras for kiddies), or refuse to sell ugly and ill fitting clothes to adults. It's your job. You do it. If you don't like parts of it, find a different profession.
What if you own the pharmacy?
This is how I feel. I don't have a problem with an entire business model based upon faith-based motives. People can run their business any way they like so long as it doesn't involve immoral or illegal actions.
Where the responsibility lies is with the state licensing boards. They should strip the license of any pharmacist who refuses to perform his or her job by choosing not to fill prescriptions based upon the pharmacist's (or business owner's) personal beliefs. To the best of my knowledge, pharmacists are not in the business of making personal decisions about medication for other individuals.
I agree with their position to not sell BCP. This is capitalism in action. It is the consumers job to demand BCP and other contraception, and to force them to fail. Companies shouldn't be forced to sell anything they don't want to sell. But they damn well need to be shown the consequences. I'd like to see NARAL organize a boycott of this pharmacy in the local area.
Yeah, but I think the actions of the lenders and banks recently has shown us that unfettered capitalism is a train wreck. ?The invisible hand fails regularly.?
Sorry Bunny. A government sponsored monopoly = socialism. Not capitalism. What we just went through with the gov't pressuring banks to lend to certain people, and providing them a gov't backed organization to do so is a glittering jewel of socialist failure and Exhibit A why gov'ts shouldn't be allowed to compete with the private sector.
Ditto. Consumer choice could and should make or break their decision. There's no reason to force pharmacies to live or die by a gov't standard. That's anti-American. Businesses should be free to provide the goods they want. And customers should be free to shop or not shop where they want. So long as the gov't allows competition/new pharmacies to enter the market this will take care of itself.
I don't think it should be of any surprise that I agree with TeamC and Caden.
I think I've mentioned the Christian tattoo parlor in my hometown before. I'm not sure how it affects what types of tattoos he does, but I do know that customers aren't allowed to curse inside. He doesn't have to be a tattoo artist. He's not entitled to that career. But it's his, and he runs his business the way he wants to run it. Just like how Chick Fil A closes on Sunday because that's the way they want to run their business. If you don't like it, don't go/eat/shop there.
Now, if you are a pharmacist at a public hospital, that's a different situation. But this is a private business and should be allowed to operate how it sees fit.
Here's how it works.
When I was 17, I worked at Kmart. Under state law, I couldn't sell cigarettes until I was 18. Kmart staffed a bunch of people, and they wrote the schedule so that someone who was 18 was always on the cash registers or near the front of the store. If someone came to my line with cigs, I either called over someone else to ring them up or sent them to another line if there wasn't a wait.
Obviously, a store that only staffs one or two people at a time, like a 7-11, would not have been able to hire me.
Same would go for someone who refused to work on the Sabbath...Kmart had lots of employees, so they could accomodate them. 7-11 might not have been able to.
That's how I see this working. I could do 99% of my Kmart job, I just had to step aside for one tiny portion of it. Kmart had to staff someone who could do this portion at all times so as not to inconvenience customers.
Obviously, if I said I had a religious objection to selling anything made in a sweatshop, I'd be fired because I couldn't sell almost anything made in Kmart. At some point, the employer's right does trump the employee's, but when it is a tiny, tiny part of the job, and it doesn't impose a hardship on the employer, I think the employee can exercise their rights.
It's a balancing test, just like all religious objections are at work. Small hardship - big employer - employer accomodates. Big hardship - big or small employer - it's a no go.
Good point Marquis. If it's a publicly-owned pharmacy then the gov't has a right to decide what is sold (and that could be good or bad depending on the administration and its policies, remember). But not privately-owned establishments.
Here's the difference between this and the physician refusing IVF to a gay couple (though I'm not sure I totally have a problem with that either, but that's another thread...).
With refusing IVF to a specific couple, the doctor is discriminating against a certain population of clients. He's picking and choosing whom he will treat.
With this, the establishment is saying, 'you want candy, soda, or birth control, you should go somewhere else'. It's not discriminating against any specific group of people other than consumers of candy, soda, and birth control. Since it's a convenience store, I imagine it's also discriminating against tire consumers, as tires are also not sold there. Or any other number of products which they don't carry.
The drug store is not saying 'I will give Mrs. Phillips orthotricycline, but I won't give it to her daughter'. It's just saying 'sorry, we don't carry that'.
Ditto Marquis again.
This is discrimination against a product, not a person. That's fine.
Okay, so what I'm getting is that you think the government should be allowed to requrie private businesses to carry a certain product.
Let's flip that around. What if the government were to ban the sale of birth control?
Why is the first situation okay but the second not? Because it's a product you like?
The government cannot dictate a a private business's inventory.
But do we really want the opinions of the majority deciding what kind of medical treatment other people can have? If you live in a small town where most people are in favor of this, you're not going to have the power to boycott these pharmacies and make them change their policies (or go out of business). Does that make it OK? In most situations I would agree and let the free market do its work, but for something like medicine, I don't think it's best to leave it up to the whims of the free market and the opinion of the majority.
But the government - theoretically at least - has to have a compelling reason to ban the sale of a certain medication, e.g. the medicine is unsafe. The government can't just say "well we don't like this" - but a private pharmacy apparently can. And that's fine if you're selling, say, CDs or clothing. But when you're licensed by the state to sell a product that society has an important interest in (like medicine), you are bound by those rules, not by your own personal whims.
The government CAN dictate a private business's inventory - can pharmacies sell, say, marijuana or heroin? Can a grocery store in Georgia sell wine on Sunday? Can a convenience store sell hard liquor without a license?
Your only other solution is the gov't dictating to all pharmacists what they should and should not carry. That might sound like a good solution until you realize an administration you don't like will get elected and dictate something you disagree with. Do you think a President Palin should be able to decide what drugs every pharmacist in the nation carries? I assume not. So what will you do then b/c you already ceded control to the gov't? When you give the gov't power you can't complain when they use it in a way you don't like.
Pharmacies are everywhere, even in small towns. I used to live in a town with 8,000 people. We had 3 pharmacies and a planned parenthood type place. Plus you can get drugs online. And if I couldn't, then I could drive myself 20 minutes to the next city that had pharmacies or phone/mail order from them. So there is choice. If there is demand for a particular drug then in a free market that demand will be satisfied. I'm not willing to go along with an exaggeration of the problem b/c it isn't widespread at all.
Then you go to the closest public hospital (there's at least one per state, I believe) or use a mail service.
AIDS medication, which is very expensive, isn't exactly available at your neighborhood drug store either.
"we don't like this" wouldnt' be their reason. A "personal whim" isn't the reason they're not selling the product.
The gov't has the right to make certain products illegal, but that's not what we're discussing. The gov't doesn't allow a convenience store to sell liquor and then dictate to it which type of liquor and which brands. That's what you're effectively asking the gov't to do to pharmacies.
Sorry - I should have said 'should not' instead of 'cannot', and I debated back and forth about saying 'within reason' because I realized that made my argument fuzzy.
But let's go with this. Should the government be able to require Target to carry cigarettes? Should all grocery stores be required to carry milk? You might be sympathetic to that last request. Why sure, milk is important, people should have access to it. But what if someone wants to have a Vegan Grocery store - shouldn't s/he be able to do that?