Plan to Ensure Pill Access Worrying Pro-Life Pharmacists
The FDA decision means that by year’s end, women can purchase the drug directly without a prescription as long as they can prove to a pharmacist they are 18 years of age or older. Younger teens still need prescriptions.
That presents a dilemma for pharmacists of conscience, said Karen Brauer, president of Ohio-based Pharmacists for Life International. She said that Plan B “is not an extremely effective means of birth control” but is mainly effective in “killing the early human embryo prior to implantation.”
Even Barr Pharmaceuticals, the New Jersey-based company that manufactures the drug, admitted that Plan B can be an abortifacient.
“Plan B may also work by preventing (the newly fertilized egg, or embryo) from attaching to the uterus (womb),” it says on its website (www.go2planb.com).”
Brauer noted that refusing to dispense
Plan B “can cause a pharmacist to be fired.” She pointed out that “dispensing
the ‘morning-after’ pill is under government coercion in
Nine states — Washington,
California, New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and
Vermont — already allow women of any age to buy Plan B without a doctor’s
prescription from certain pharmacies. Jodie Wagner, a pharmacist working in
“The fear is not so much in losing one’s job but in losing one’s license to practice,” she said.
Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire has been actively involved in applying pressure to the state’s pharmacy board to reject the Washington State Pharmacy Association’s draft of a conscience clause. She has made it clear that she objects to patients being denied drugs on the basis of pharmacists’ “personal objections or biases.”
Although federal and state constitutions protect a right of conscience for all citizens, it has become increasingly apparent that such protections are being ignored.
Robert Muise,
an attorney with
“We are trying to breathe life back into the Free Exercise Clause” of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, protecting religious belief, he stated.
Cases have arisen concerning everything from Boy Scout troops penalized for restricting membership, to Catholic agencies refusing adoption services to homosexual couples, to health care providers not wishing to perform abortions or physician-assisted suicides. The list of cases keeps growing.
Muise argues that where a need for accessibility tries to trump conscience, it has little to do with access and everything to do with forcing an agenda on people of faith.
So what can the pharmacists do?
Kirsten Waggoner, an attorney specializing in such issues with the law firm
Ellis, Li & McKinstry in
Support for pharmacists’ rights of
conscience in
There are also legal and legislative actions that can help keep the issue of a neglected right of conscience before the public, Muise said.
Pharmacists for Life will help in finding legal assistance for pharmacists facing disciplinary actions. Brauer stated that “pharmacists need to be able to afford to use civil law protections. But this is expensive and out of reach of most unemployed health professionals, though a number of agencies are offering help.”
Brauer insisted that all is not hopeless.
She stated, “The lawsuits in
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- September 17-23, 2006