You know -- the ones who don't belong to that great "Pharmacists for Death" conspiracy that all the other pharmacists in the world belong to.
If you really want to know about them, here:
http://www.pfli.org/The original tale is the epic one of Karen Brauer, the K-Mart pharmacist fired for the same offence against professional ethics. She became the darling of the anti-choice Rightgrrls -- sort of forerunners of freepers, with more intellectual airs; Carolyn Gargaro and the other one and the assortment of right-wing loons who inhabited their now-defunct message board:
http://www.rightgrrl.com/guestbook/guest.html (you can still read archives).
Read about Karen Brauer, the "Hoosier Pharmer" on the internet and the Rightgrrls' message board, from their perspective, here:
http://www.rightgrrl.com/dec97grrl/I mean, if you have a finely honed sense of black humour and are able to avoid tearing your hair out and throwing things when reading such drivel and tripe.
If you search for Brauer at Google, you'll find all sorts of anti-choice outfits fawning over her, but soldier on and you'll find real facts:
http://www.choice.org/accessmonth/kmart.htmlWhen K-mart hired Karen Brauer as a pharmacist ten years ago, the company had every expectation she would serve the needs of all its clients. Instead, at least 10 times over the course of seven years, she turned away women who came to the pharmacy with prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception.
In 1996, Brauer untruthfully told a customer that the contraceptive she wanted was out of stock, in order to avoid having to dispense the medication. The customer realized Brauer was lying and complained to K-mart. After learning of her repeated refusal to dispense the drug Micronor and other birth control pills, K-mart asked Brauer to sign a statement agreeing to dispense all medications, regardless of her own religious objections. Brauer, who is an anti-choice Catholic, was unwilling to do so. K-mart then fired her on the grounds that she was denying customers access to legitimate prescriptions.
In August 1999, three years after Brauer was dismissed, the American Center for Law and Justice, which provides legal aid to anti-abortion protesters, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati. In the suit, Brauer is claiming that K-mart violated both state and federal laws by firing her "because of her religion." ...
I believe she lost that suit.
"Professions", such as law, medicine, engineering
and pharmacy, are given extraordinary powers by society. People who do not belong to the profession are prohibited from providing the services it deals in -- non-lawyers may not practise law, non-doctors may not practise medicine, and so on.
Society empowers those professions to be "self-governing" -- to set rules of professional ethics and to set the minimum qualifications for practising. The professions are required to do these things
in the public interest, and their members are required to practise the professions in a way that is
in the public interest. The powers they and their members are given are not given to them for their own benefit, they are given to them for the public's benefit.
Someone who does not wish to dispense contraceptive pills is entirely at liberty
not to become a pharmacist. S/he is *not* at liberty to act contrary to a client's interests, i.e. refuse to provide the services legitimately sought by a client, based on his/her own personal prejudices, regardless of what the basis for those prejudices is -- whether it be a belief that people of colour are inferior and should not be served at pharmacies, or a belief that preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg (which it is
speculated the "morning-after" and contraceptive pills may do) is evil.
So far, it seems to have been employees of large corporations who have been caught violating professional ethics, clearly grounds for dismissal. I'm curious to see what might happen if a self-employed pharmacist does the same.
(Pharmacists may and should refuse to fill prescriptions if, in their
professional and not personal judgment, a medication is not in the best interests of a client, for instance for a medication-conflict reason the physician may not have been aware of, and of course must then consult with the prescribing physician to discuss the concerns.)
The American Pharmaceutical Association seems to have passed this resolution in 1998:
1998 Pharmacist Conscience Clause
1. APhA recognizes the individual pharmacist's right to exercise conscientious refusal and supports the establishment of systems to ensure patient's access to legally prescribed therapy without compromising the pharmacist's right of conscientious refusal.
2. APhA shall appoint a council to serve as a resource for the profession in addressing and understanding ethical issues.
Seems to me that "conscientious refusal" could cover just about anything. How about a Christian Science pharmacist, who "conscientiously" refused to dispense
anything??
Fortunately, the APhA is *not* the governing body of the pharmacy profession -- it is the voluntary body formed by pharmacists to promote their own interests.
The profession is governed, in the US, by state Boards of Pharmacy, and as far as I know, they don't recognize "conscientious objection" as grounds for denying professional services.
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