Recently, the debate over abortion and birth control has checked out of the doctor’s office, and is now shifting around impatiently in the lines of pharmacies.
Over the past six months, there have been at least 180 documented situations in which a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for birth control or similar drugs involving reproduction. These are professional representatives of the medical industry refusing to give women medications that they have been prescribed and, in some cases, even refusing to give patients their prescriptions back so they can go elsewhere to have them filled.
Different states handle the issue in different ways. After a Chicago woman was unable to receive her birth control prescription, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich put out an April 1 emergency rule stating that pharmacists must fill contraceptive prescriptions, with “No delays. No hassles. No lectures.” If the pharmacist absolutely will not fill the prescription, they must immediately find someone else who will.
In an opposite move, the Arizona House of Representatives recently approved something called a conscience clause, meaning that any pharmacist who does not wish to fill a particular prescription because of moral or religious ground is not required to do so. That pharmacist is also not required to refer the prescription-seeker to another pharmacy.
This nationwide situation brings to light a serious a problem: the placement of morals, usually religious, within the medical sphere. Doctors in many states are also subject to a different type of conscience clause that allows them to refuse abortion procedures based on moral principles as long as they refer their patients to other abortion doctors. In this case, the conscience clause usually makes sense.
Pharmacists, however, are in a different position. A doctor opposed to abortion would not enter a field of specialization that required the performance of such a procedure; pharmacists do not have this luxury, they distribute all forms of drugs. For a pharamcist to refuse to fill a prescription for birth control, a commonly prescribed drug, would be akin to a physician refusing to see patients with sexually transmitted infections.
It is important to consider the meaning behind Arizona’s decision: a pharmacist’s belief that sex before marriage is wrong overrides a patient’s decision to prevent unwanted pregnancy. A pharmacist’s morals may dictate that it is wrong to prevent oneself from ovulating, but the woman’s morals probably dictate that it is wrong to have unprotected sex before she is ready to raise a child. To think that the morals of the pharmacist, a third party, could be valued above the morals of a patient under any circumstance is ridiculous.
Regardless of their personal feelings, pharmacists are part of the medical profession, and they have a job to perform. Those who cannot bring objectivity to their jobs should be barred from practice.
Oregon should take a page from the modern Hippocratic Oath — prevention is preferable to cure. The state must require phramacists to fill patients’ prescriptions, regardless of their personal ethics. We need proper conscience clauses here to hold pharmacists to the standards of objectivity we expect in the medical field.

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