I respect the feelings of pharmacists who, as a matter of conscience, refuse to sell the new “morning-after” emergency contraception pill. I also respectfully disagree with them. In fact, I wonder how many druggists who object to dispensing the morning-after pill have no objection to selling erectile-dysfunction drugs, like the one that advertises that a doctor should be consulted if an erection lasts more than four hours.
I don’t question the sincerity of the warning (priapism, as doctors call the condition, can be a very serious matter, despite the jokes of countless comedians). But I would wager that this is the first drug warning that has actually enhanced the sales of the product.
The issue of “conscientious objections,” as the previously little-known Ohio-based group called Pharmacists for Life International calls it, has bubbled up in recent months with more than 100 reports of pharmacists who are just saying “no” to dispensing the morning-after pill, also known as Plan B.
About two dozen states have responded with a patchwork of legal and political actions, which probably forecast the state-to-state crazy quilt of abortion laws that would re-emerge if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.
For example, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich recently made national headlines by ordering pharmacies, although not all pharmacists, in Illinois to fill Plan B prescriptions after an incident where a pharmacist at a downtown Chicago drugstore refused to fill two. The Massachusetts legislature is considering a bill to let pharmacists dispense the pill without a doctor’s prescription and require all hospitals to make it available to all rape victims. A bill in California would require objecting pharmacists to be prepared to make referrals to other drugstores.
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Arkansas, South Dakota, Mississippi and Georgia have conscience-clause laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense any drugs related to contraception or abortion on moral grounds. Legislatures in about a dozen other states, including Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, are considering similar bills.
Who knows how many women and teen girls in distress already have been turned away and been too pained or embarrassed by the experience to go public. How many even would have the fortitude, in such circumstances, to object when a zealous anti-choice pharmacist refuses, in an act of conscience, to refer them to another pharmacy or even to give them back their prescription?
Yes, that’s the sort of control-freak action that Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life International, favors. Besides refusing to fill the prescriptions, she advocates preaching a little morality lecture to the would-be consumer, including erroneously exaggerated claims that Plan B acts like an abortion.
In interviews, Brauer has said that a pharmacist should not only refuse to dispense medication that offends her but also block all future access by that patient to that medication. Referrals, she says, would be like saying, “I don’t kill people myself but let me tell you about the guy down the street who does.” Is this, I wonder, the sort of information that major drugstores want their customers to hear when they come in with serious medical questions?
I like pharmacists, but they are neither doctors nor clergy. Those who want to give morality lectures might try another line of work, especially when their zealotry in the pharmacy only serves to delay something as time-sensitive as emergency contraception.
Unlike the French drug RU-486, Plan B is not an abortion drug. Best taken within 24 hours of unprotected intercourse, the morning-after pill prevents ovulation or fertilization or blocks a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in the uterus.
Of course, much of this Plan B dispute would become moot if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sale. The agency’s scientists and review panels support that move, but abortion politics are blocking it in Washington, where the health-care concerns of Congress and the White House appear to begin and end these days with one tube-fed woman in Florida.
While we wait for common sense to invade Washington again, here’s my suggestion: If druggists want to argue that they have the right to pick and choose which prescriptions to sell, they should be required to post their choices at the front door.
And, as a matter of gender equity, we need to inconvenience men too. Stores that refuse to sell Plan B on moral grounds, for example, should be prohibited from selling male-oriented sex aids.
After all, selling sex-enhancement drugs to men while denying morning-after pills to women dodges moral responsibility too. It’s sort of like sowing your wild oats on Saturday night, then praying on Sunday morning for crop failure.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]