The N.C. Board of Pharmacy has a new policy covering the filling of prescriptions for Plan B, a.k.a., "the morning-after pill." Pharmacists may refuse to fill the prescriptions but requires them to find alternative arrangements for the client. The second half of that sentence is the crucial part: they must help the customer get the pill.
Which is what a Kerr Pharmacy employee demonstrably did not do in 2004. A Wake Forest couple, Jonathan and Lauren Gaines, were denied the morning-after pills by James Morgan, a pharmacist at Kerr Drug in Wakefield, who also apparently offered no help in finding another pharmacist to fill the prescription. Morgan's refusal reportedly left Lauren Gaines in tears, and her husband filed a complaint which he later withdrew when Kerr Drug fired Morgan. "There's room for people of good conscience to have their beliefs," Jonathan Gaines said. "But I don't feel they should be in a position to impose their beliefs."
Precisely the point.
"The new policy requires pharmacists who object to the ... drugs to do all they can not to obstruct their delivery."
What the policy doesn't address specifically is ... what about women in rural areas where there's often a single monopoly on the dispensing of drugs? Wal-Mart, for one example, refuses to stock the pills in their pharmacies ... bless their hypocritical billion-dollar hearts.
The fact that pharmacists like Morgan -- who incidentally is now working for another drugstore -- obviously either don't care how the pills work or don't know and feel very free to associate "Plan B" with abortion speaks volumes about their competence as pharmacists ... not to mention their competence as moral arbitors.
Friday, April 22, 2005
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