Isn’t that between me and my doctor?
A bill entitled The Pharmacists Freedom of Conscience Act is making its way through the Tennessee legislature. It will allow pharmacists to cite moral objections as a reason for refusing to dispense drugs without fear of liability or disciplinary measures. WATE has more.
The bill is being called (and rightfully so) an effort to limit access to contraceptives. And Viagra, I’d guess.
April 5th, 2005 at 10:21 am
That article doesn’t mention it, but other coverage I’ve seen of the isse is that one of the objections is to dispensing morning-after pills or abortion pills like RU-486.
April 5th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
What’s next? A bill that will allow poll workers the right to not give out ballots to people they don’t like? Or perhaps one to let military personel decide which wars they want to fight?
April 5th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
What’s wrong with Viagra? It doesn’t kill babies, it helps make them. That’s okay!
April 5th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
I used the “V-word” that Uncle used in his main post, and apparently the spam filter ate it. 🙂
April 5th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
“What’s next? A bill that will allow poll workers the right to not give out ballots to people they don’t like? Or perhaps one to let military personel decide which wars they want to fight?”
Those are government positions, rather than private sector jobs, so it’s not analogous.
I haven’t made up my mind about this, but I have a question. Do you think ob/gyns should be required to perform elective abortions? (That is, abortions that are *not* medically necessary to save the mother’s life.) Or should their principles allow them to object to what they see as the taking of a life?
April 5th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
SU, if you want an abortion, that’s issue between you and the biology gods, not between you and your doctor. But if a doctor has a right to refuse any procedure that is “between you and your doctor,” why shouldn’t a pharmacist have the same right to refuse any transaction between you and your pharmacist? What’s next, a law requiring all licensed attorneys to represent the Unabomber?
Manish’s analogies are inapt because poll workers and military workers are employed by the government to implement government policy, while pharmacists are not. They’re licensed, of course, but mostly to prevent them from providing services they aren’t supposed to provide, not to coerce them into providing every service liberals want them to provide. As a libertarian, I would have thought you’d be sympathetic to a law aimed at not coercing anybody to offer any services they don’t want to provide. Is there an abortion exception to this otherwise sensible principle?
April 5th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
I concur that that a pharmacist should be allowed to decide what he/she dispenses. However, I don’t think they should be free of liability in the event they override a decision made by a doctor and that impacts the health of someone.
April 5th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Huh? Since when does anyone get sued for merely NOT taking part in a transaction he/she wants no part of? Suing a pharmacist for refusing to sell abortion pills makes no more sense to me than suing a doctor for refusing to perform a traditional abortion (or suing a lawyer for refusing to represent you, or, or …).
April 6th, 2005 at 6:41 am
Did you read what I wrote:
‘I don’t think they should be free of liability in the event they override a decision made by a doctor and that impacts the health of someone. ‘
People get sued all the time, they should be no different. Winning the suit is a different matter. I don’t think a pharmacist should be free from liability since they are deferring medical decisions to the pharmacist. And, you know, issuing backdoor birth control bans.
April 6th, 2005 at 9:54 am
I read it, I just don’t understand it. People can generally get sued for what they do (e.g. for selling a defective product), not for what they don’t do (e.g., for not carrying a particular product). I can sue my pharmacist for not carrying abortion pills, I should be able to sue my grocer for not being a pharmacist at all and not carrying any prescription drugs I might need.
April 6th, 2005 at 9:57 am
I’m not talking about what they carry, I’m talking about when they refuse to provide a treatment as specified by a doctor.
April 7th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
Xrlq:
The answer is a resounding “no.” It’s not even close to the same thing. Your pharmacist isn’t a decision maker in this role. There’s never a choice “between you and your pharmacist” beyond maybe choosing between brand name or generic. The decision of what medications to take is between you and your doctor, not you and your pharmacist.
Your pharmacist cannot (legally) decide to give you a drug not prescribed by your doctor. Why should that same pharmacist be legally allowed to decide to deny you a drug that was prescribed by your doctor?
They shouldn’t get sued for this, they should get fired for this. If I got a job as a cashier at a convenience store, and I refused to ring alcohol because I’m “morally opposed” to alcohol consumption, you can bet your behind I’d get canned. If I don’t want to sell alcohol, then I shouldn’t get a job that requires me to sell alcohol. Why should pharmacists get a special exemption here? If they don’t want to dole out birth control pills (or whatever else), then don’t get a job as a pharmacist.
April 7th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
That doesn’t follow at all. You need a license to sell regulated drugs. You don’t need a license NOT to sell them, any more than I need a license NOT to represent people I don’t like in court.
Right. But if you are morally opposed to alcohol consumption, you are free as a bird to work in stores that don’t sell alcohol, or even to set up a semi-convenience store of your own that doesn’t sell alcohol. Similarly, a person who wishes to work as a pharmacist but not assist abortions has every right to work for Karl’s Katholic Pharmacy; he just doesn’t have a right to work for a pharmacy that chooses to provide the services he doesn’t personally wish to provide. But then again, you’re a liberal, so you’re allowed to disagree with me on that. I’m just puzzled that Uncle, a professed liberatarian, does.
April 8th, 2005 at 12:25 am
Xrlq:
Except that by NOT selling them, you’re effectively overriding a doctor’s decision. That is, a doctor has deemed a drug appropriate and/or necessary, and you are denying that drug to the patient. And you have absolutely no problem with this? That stuns me.
I’m not quite sure I follow you here. But if you’re saying that you believe a pharmacist does NOT have a duty to fill any legal prescription he receives, then yes, I’d have to vehemently disagree with you.
Besides, I think the whole line of reasoning about “personal moral choice” is a bunch of thinly-veiled bullshit trying to hide the real agenda: since they lost their battle to make birth control and abortions illegal, they try to find as many ways as they can to deny people access to them. This isn’t about not being party to birth control or abortions, it’s about denying people those same things.
April 8th, 2005 at 10:17 am
No, you’re not. You’re just not helping to carry it out. It’s hardly the same as tearing up a prescription and calling every other pharmacist in town to get them all to refuse the prescription.
Legally, I don’t know. Morally, absolutely. No one has a “duty” to sell anything to anybody, any more than anyone has a duty to buy from anyone in particular. But like I said before, I’m not surprised you disagree; liberals are supposed to be hostile to free enterprise.
If the patient gets a prescription but chooses not to fill it, he is “overriding a doctor’s decision,” too, even more so than the pharmacist, whose only impact is to inconvenience the patient who must now fill it somewhere else. Does this mean it should be illegal for any patient not to obtain or take any drug prescribed to them?
April 8th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Xrlq:
I thought it was the liberals who were supposed to be big-city elitists. People who live in small towns and don’t have several pharmacies to choose from don’t warrant any consideration? And ignoring any of that, at best you’re still adding even more hassle to a health care process that’s already filled to the brim with hassles.
And me-first conservatives are supposed to be hostile to public interest, so I guess your stance here shouldn’t surprise me anywhere near as much as it does. Besides, I thought “free enterprise” was supposed to be about the employer, not the employee. (And by the way, nobody really wants “free enterprise,” not even self-professed conservatives. They just use “free enterprise” as a talking point to try to get rid of the specific rules they don’t like.)
Mr. “that doesn’t follow at all” unloads that line of tripe on me? Here’s a hint: If a person chooses not to take the prescription, they are making a decision based on personal autonomy and nothing else. But if the person decides to take the prescription, he or she can’t just do it on their own: they need a pharmacist to provide them with the prescription. That’s the difference. If a pharmacist doesn’t want to prescribe certain drugs, they too can exercise personal autonomy: they can get a job doing something else. Neither I nor anyone else I know wants to stop them.
I think your problem here is that your hatred of abortion (and possibly birth control, but I don’t know) is clouding your thinking on this. This whole “conscience” bill is a means to an end: to block access to birth control and abortion by any means available.
But what if my “conscience” tells me that AIDS is a punishment from God for promiscuous sexual behavior, and so I decide I’m not willing to prescribe AZT? Or that I can’t in good conscience serve the Jews, who killed Christ, or the Mexicans who steal American jobs, or the blacks because, well, they’re black? Once you open that door, how can you possibly draw that legal line?
One thing’s for sure: if I were a lawmaker and thought this bill had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, I’d attach an amendment requiring pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions to direct you to the nearest pharmacist who will, and requiring the pharmacies where those pharmacists work to post signs outside saying “we won’t honor all prescriptions.”
April 9th, 2005 at 12:38 am
I don’t know where you got the idea that I hate abortion, let alone birth control, but you’re way off base. What I do hate is forced transactions.
We have laws against discriminating by race, religion and, depending on the state you live in, sexual orientation in commercial contexts. I’m not arguing for a pharmacist exception to those laws. I am arguing against a pharmacist exception to the general principle that “we reserve the right to refuse to serve anyone.”
That’s a great idea, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Let’s also have every restaurant post warnings that they don’t serve every dish you might possibly want to eat, nor even every imaginable dish associated with whatever nationality their cuisine is. Let’s have the Yardhouse post a warning that even they don’t carry every brand of beer that’s popular somewhere in the world, nor even a single brand of dark hefeweizen. Record stores should carry warnings that they don’t carry every CD currently in print. And of course all doctors should have post warnings that they don’t perform all medical services, particularly if one of the services they don’t provide happens to be abortion.
April 11th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
I’m not quite sure this qualifies as a “forced transaction.” You’re not a pharmacist to sell anything of his/her own. All you’re asking is for the pharmacist to do his or her job, which is to provide patients with the medications their doctors have deemed that they should take.
Should cashiers be allowed to refuse to ring things they’re not comfortable ringing? Is everything they ring a “forced transaction,” because they’re required by their jobs to ring whatever a customer attempts to buy? Your same logic, after all, applies to them, too. Why a special exemption for pharmacists? I thought conservatives were supposed to hate special exemptions.
Sugar-coat it all you want, you’re essentially arguing that the right of the pharmacist to selectively not do his job trumps the right of a patient to actually receive those medications their doctors have deemed appropriate. To put it in Uncle-speak, the pharamcists should be “like you and me, only better,” in that you and I have to do our jobs or be fired. The patient, in this case, has no rights that are worthy of your consideration, it seems (other than perhaps the right to go somewhere else and be refused there, too).
Your answer to my earlier question about “what happens if a patient can’t find any pharmacist willing to fill their legally-obtained prescription” appears to be “tough titty, them’s the breaks in the ‘free market.'” If that’s not your answer, then by all means enlighten me.
You forgot gender, which directly applies in this particular context. Particularly if the pharmacist’s morality allows the filling of Viagra but not of
Yes, because in Xrlq-land, what I choose to eat for dinner is exactly the same thing as prescription medication.
I’ve come to the conclusion that you have to be playing the role of troll here, because there’s no way you can actually be this closed-minded and ignorant. You simply have to be working at it. How else can one possibly argue that my right to keep my job as a pharmacist while only selectively filling prescriptions trumps your right to actually obtain legally-prescribed medicines?