Pharmacy Wars

Recently on his radio program, in the name of tolerance, Dr. Dean Edell suggested that if Christian pharmacists had scruples about dispensing contraceptives on the job, they should find other careers. And it’s not just liberal radio talkers who want to ride roughshod over the religious rights of highly trained health care professionals.

Last April, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered pharmacies in the state that sell contraceptives to also make available Plan B, the morning-after-pill, stating imperiously, “No delays. No hassles. No lectures.” Penalties for noncompliance in Illinois range from a fine to revocation of a pharmacy’s right to dispense drugs.

Massachusetts regulators ordered Wal-Mart to stock and sell Plan B at all of its 44 pharmacies in the state. Officials at the retail giant responded to the pressure by saying they will now make the drug, which pro-lifers say may prevent implantation of nascent human life, available at all 3,700 Wal-Marts nationwide.

So much for tolerance.

Last year, I gently took conservative columnist David Limbaugh to task for the alarmist-sounding title of his well-researched 2003 book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. Here and elsewhere I suggested that the word "persecution" overstates the hardships that Christians face from secular elites intent on imposing their arid orthodoxies on society.

Yet what else can you call it when Christians are forced to choose between their livelihoods and their religious convictions? Such agonizing choices occur with disturbing frequency for Christians in Muslim-dominated lands. They shouldn’t happen here.

“So you may reasonably quibble with the title of the book if you choose,” Limbaugh told me, “but it is important that we call attention to the discrimination and mistreatment that is occurring and alert people out of their slumber.”

Noted. Now what?

Abortion-rights supporters claim that an average of one pharmacist per day has refused to fill a prescription—usually for contraceptives or abortifacients—for reasons of religion or conscience. Currently, the federal Food and Drug Administration has declined to decide whether to make Plan B available without a prescription, so advocates on both sides of the issue are scrambling to influence state legislators.

According to the Chicago Tribune, more than 60 such bills have been filed in state legislatures in 2006, some of them hostile to pharmacists who want to exercise their religious convictions. One bill, just introduced in Colorado, would allow pharmacists to actually prescribe Plan B themselves, without the intervention of a physician.

“But proposed laws in some states,” the Tribune notes, “would make it more difficult for many women to get emergency contraception. Legislation in New Hampshire, for instance, would require parental notification before the drug is dispensed. More than 20 other states will consider bills that give pharmacies the right to not stock the drug, and pharmacists the right to not dispense it, even to women with prescriptions.”

“Conscience clauses” are already fairly routine for physicians. Since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was handed down, 47 states allowed exemptions for doctors who have moral qualms about abortion. The American Medical Association permits physicians, hospitals, and hospital staff to opt out of any act that violates “personally held moral principles.” In fact, in 10 states, health-care professionals may refuse to provide contraceptives. The American Pharmacists Association, as a matter of policy, already permits pharmacists to decline to fill prescriptions if they provide some other avenue for patients to get their prescriptions.

In the Senate, strange bedfellows Ted Kennedy and Rick Santorum have introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. This bipartisan bill, supported by 45 religious and civil-rights groups, would allow the nation’s 217,000 pharmacists to refuse to dispense certain drugs as long as another pharmacist who would is available. The bill is currently in committee.

If we want to continue attracting the best and brightest to careers in pharmacy, we cannot discriminate against those with strong religious convictions. People may or may not have a right to contraceptives or Plan B. But they don’t have the right to force pharmacists to give it to them.