Pharmacists: Our New Moral Leaders

AMERICAblog has located yet another occurence of a pharmacist with a God complex. These can no longer be dismissed as mere isolated incidents...they are becoming a trend. Here is the situation: pharmacists are refusing to provide lawfully prescribed birth control pills and other contraception to certain individuals based exclusively on the pharmacists' own religious objections to the drugs. (ie. objections to premarital sex, abortion, etc.)

The most recent instance of this phenomenon was in Tucson, Arizona.

After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work.

While calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, she found that most did not stock the drug.

When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

This story breaks on the heels of recent reports that numerous Target pharmacists have refused to fill presrciptions for birth control over recent months on allegedly "moral" grounds.

Planned Parenthood is attempting to get persons involved in highlighting and hopefully ending this discriminatory practice.

I don't care which side of the aisle you're one --- when a woman carrying a valid prescription for important, legal drugs is turned away from a pharmacy because the pharmacist personally condemns that woman's choice of lifestyle, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I really don't have anything to add to other blogs that have already commented upon this disturbing phenomenon. It's interesting that our nation spends so much time obsessed with the President's Supreme Court appointments, fearful that it will spell the end of ROE v. WADE, yet the real threat to women's reproductive rights comes not from a woman in a black robe, but a person in a white lab coat who bestows medication only upon the righteous.