The mixing of morality and medicine kind of makes me uncomfortable. Birth control is one thing, but what about something more serious? Let's say you're someone with a serious illness and the Doctor prescribes Oxycontin: what if the pharmacist is some moral crusader who refuses to sell it to you because he/she thinks the drug is terrible?
I have one thing to say on this. Your job is your job, and if your company is selling products that you are personally against, then you have to either leave your job or suck it up. I'm sorry, but I don't believe it's right to let moral beliefs get in the way of your job unless the job is *directly* related to moral beliefs. Pharmacists shouldn't have the right to not hand out birth control to girls who don't want to get pregnant.
Louis, the thing is, the company may be an independent store owned by the pharmacist...so it will be selling the products the pharmacist is choosing to stock, more or less.
Exactly. I think this whole thing is stupid. I don't want to get too involved in it, but let's just say that I'm 99.9% against it.
Yeah, just so long as there are birth control pills available in some way for the women prescribed them.
I think I pretty much agree with esaul. If an employee is denying the customer something that's in stock then it's not right. If it's an independent place that doesn't stock it anyway then it may be inconvenient, unfortunately, but there probably isn't much room to complain besides that.
The problem here is that there aren't very many independent pharmacies in the U.S., as they're harder to control, and it's very unlikely this pharmacy is "independent" anyway. The fact that the pharmacist actively refuses a product in stock is what the problem is, here. They're not refusing something that's not in stock, so to bring that up doesn't even make sense.
Okay, here in Toronto there are quite a few independent pharmacies not run as part of Shoppers Drug Mart, Guardian Drugs, or Rexall. If you don't own the place, then you are bound to the duty of who you are working for. So unless the Shoppers Drug Mart CEOs and such decide to be against birth control, then the pharmacists working there have to do what they are hired to do and fill the prescriptions if they can. But the law in question seemed to be calling for all pharmacists to have to fill all prescriptions, which would include independents and remove any choice they had to what to stock their own shelves with (unless I misread it, but it didn't seem to say the choice was in the owners hands). That is what I was iffy on, government meddling in other people's businesses. I would like to avoid it if possible (but it may not be possible, getting birth control to women comes first).
We're talking about pharmacists who have birth control in stock and are refusing to sell them to women. Bringing up products "not in stock" has nothing to do with this at all. If it's not in stock, fair game, but these products are in stock.
Just to be clear, we are not talking about running out of stock of the item, but making the decision to never carry it.
I know. If it's not being carried, there's no problem. But when it's in stock and the pharmacist is actively refusing to sell the product—that's when the problem arises. They shouldn't be able to refuse a product that's in stock because they think it's wrong for a 17-year-old girl to use it.
If it's an independent pharmacy and they refuse to carry it, that's fine, but there should be a sign on the door celarly stating birth control isn't sold there so some poor woman doesn't have to suffer the embarrassment of getting lectured by a bible thumping pharmacist when she asks for the medicine.
I'm a Christian and all but I'm not a big fan of religion by any means and Christianity is strictly a personal thing to me. I try not to align myself with the Christian masses because I abhor them. I hate people who obstruct rights according to religion and force their beliefs upon unwilling people to exercise some superiority. Birth control is preventative; its absence will only worsen the problem it serves to prevent.