Abortion's Only Step One
This woman couldn't get her birth-control prescription filled:
For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control."I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."
Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.
On one hand, it seems a free-market thing -- nobody should be forced to sell what they don't believe in. But, here's a what if: What if the fundamentalists recognize this, and start a big push to send people to pharmacy school? Don't laugh -- they spent years stocking up AM radio with Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, and the like. And what if the pharmacist "doesn't believe in" some drug you need?
Take me: I take Ritalin for ADHD -- have taken it for maybe five years. What if a pharmacist doesn't think people should be "medicated" to concentrate better? Or, what if they, like some religious nutcases, don't believe in messing with "god's will" at all -- and they see it as god's will that you should die from some dread disease instead of taking two pills a day to keep it from killing you?
I have a few right-wing friends who are rather blithe about the dangers of voting in fundamentalism by voting in George Bush -- and they really shouldn't be so blithe. And it's not just freedoms that are in jeopardy. Here are a few good points from BushFlash.com (sorry, no permalink to the piece):
IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN COMING HERE TO GLOAT......save your breath
Bush may have won...but YOU lost.
Here's why:
When overtime pay is eliminated, it won't just be terminated for liberals. You're going to lose yours, as well.
You're going to have to live in the same polluted America as the rest of us.
When the next terrorist attack hits us -- and it will -- the al-Qaeda isn't just going to target Democrats only.
When Social Security goes bankrupt, there won't be any exceptions made for Bush supporters.
The drug companies aren't going to cut Republican seniors any slack with the new Medicare prescription-drug plan either Your folks will also have their coverage changed arbitrarily whenever Merck, Pfizer, et al. feel like it.
( And they won't have any better access to cheaper pharmaceuticals from Canada than anyone else. )
Body armor and armored vehicles in Iraq are not going to doled on the basis of political leanings.
Bottom line, you're in the same leaky lifeboat as the rest of us -- you just don't know it yet.
Posted by aalkon at November 10, 2004 8:55 AM
Comments
It's not just your local Phundamentalist Pharmacist. President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee.
Hager is an MD who won't prescribe birth control to unmarried women and believes that The Pill is an abortifacient. He believes that PMS can be controlled by Bible-reading... etc. I could go on but I haven't the stomach for it. Look him up.
Posted by: The Prop at November 10, 2004 10:37 AM
hmmmm...I can think of a couple of women with PMS I'd like to have this clown read the bible to.
There is a law here in New Mexico that allows a pharmacist to over-rule a doctors written prescription if the pharmacist has a 'problem' with it. I ran up against this with something begnin like thyroid medication. I was shocked that a doctors judgement could be called into question in this way.
Things get curiouser and curiouser.
Posted by: Sheryl at November 10, 2004 4:22 PM
Who wants birth control pills anyway? I love getting pregnant, because it gives me an opportunity to KILL A BABY!
Posted by: Lena at November 11, 2004 7:16 AM
That's really incredible, Sheryl. Scary, too. What was the objection...if you don't mind revealing it? PS When my shrink was out of town and I needed Ritalin, I saw one of the other shrinks on staff at Kaiser. The guy said something to me along the lines of suggesting that I should stop taking Ritalin. My response: incredulity. "Wait, I'm so much more productive (through better living through chemistry) and with pretty low chances of side effects, and minor, at that...and this is a problem? It's the modern age. If I can chemically alter my brain so I function better...why shouldn't I be allowed to?" PS I don't see ADHD or ADD as a disorder; simply a different way of thinking (more multi-focused than uni-focused). I'm the acid test for what's boring. Just watch if I fidget. Or run out of the room screaming, as the case may be.
Posted by: Amy Alkon at November 11, 2004 11:29 AM
Two comments. First regarding pharmacistís ability to overrule a prescription: using the example of thyroid medication if the physician wrote something that looked like 100 mg, verses 100 micrograms (the Greek micro looks like a ëuí with a downward tail on the left, easily confused with the ëmí of micro) the doctor gets a call and the dose gets clarified. I am very grateful there are pharmacists to keep track of all the myriad medications with multiple monikers (not only for myself but for all of medicine).
However, as for their ability to unilaterally decide what to dispense or not is almost too dark of a thought to contemplate if it became the standard of care. I wonder what would happen if I refused to treat all the Medicare/MediCal fatties who come in for a gastric bypass (now covered by YOUR tax dollars!)? Or what if we started charging people a surcharge for their medications, treatments, surgeries, physical therapy, etc. based on their fatness, a sliding-scale basis, if you will? I can just hear the outrage nowÖ
Posted by: Dr. Jensen at November 11, 2004 6:54 PM