It’s a rare day when I’m in agreement with Planned Parenthood, but this guy was just wrong:
A state appeals court upheld sanctions Tuesday against a pharmacist who refused to dispense birth control pills to a woman and wouldn’t transfer her prescription elsewhere.
The 3rd District Court of Appeals ruled the punishment the state Pharmacy Examining Board handed down against pharmacist Neil Noesen did not violate his state constitutional rights, specifically his “right of conscience” to religiously oppose birth control.
He can oppose birth control as an abortifacient all he wants, but to refuse to transfer the prescription was completely out of bounds.
The Pharmacy Examining Board ruled in 2005 that Noesen failed to carry out his professional responsibility to get the woman’s prescription to someone else if he wouldn’t fill it himself.
The board reprimanded Noesen and ordered him to attend ethics classes. He was allowed to keep his license as long as he informs all future employers in writing that he won’t dispense birth control pills and outlines steps he will take to make sure a patient has access to medication.
The board also found Noesen liable for the cost of the proceedings against him — about $20,000 — but the appeals court ordered the board to reconsider that decision.
Noesen said the discipline “critically devastated” his business as a traveling pharmacist because some pharmacies refused to hire him and he lost his liability insurance, court records said.
Pharmacists should have the right to not fill certain prescriptions just as doctors have the right to not perform abortions. To require pharmacists to fill all prescriptions regardless of their faith or conscience would effectively lock devout people of several faiths out of the profession. But pharmacies should also have the right to question prospective employees about their willingness to fill any prescription they are asked to fill, and hire accordingly, without fear of a lawsuit. Similarly, grocery stores should be able to question prospective Muslim employees about their willingness to stock and sell pork products or anything else offensive to Islam. A simple question for any job interview in any industry – are you willing to do all the tasks required for this job? And if someone’s faith requires them to answer “no” then let that be the end of the interview with no nonsense from the ACLU about it.
While people who practice a faith have every right to opt out of certain activities, employers and the public should not be penalized for it or required to accommodate it. For people of faith who want to work in a particular profession – anyone who wants to open a halal grocery store or a drugstore free of all forms of birth control can do so.
Hmm…I truly may have the wrong impression of the facts here, so take that into account when considering my comment. It SOUNDS like this guy could have been self-employed and still have received the same whacking from the Board for doing what he did. If that’s so, it’s wrong. Easy way to check this is to do a simple thought experiment: it’s 1939 Germany and a woman realizes that the 2-year old child she adopted is actually Jewish so she wants to kill him, but being a humanitarian she wants to do it painlessly. So she gets a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates from a ‘physician’ (using the term loosely…) and takes it to a pharmacist to fill. If he is morally opposed to the killing of Jewish 2-year-olds, should he be forced to transfer the Rx somewhere else?
OTOH, if the pharmacist was trying to force his employer to allow him to work for them while refusing to dispense death drugs, and the owners wanted him to dispense them, then they should be able to fire him w/o repercussions. But, if so, how does the Pharmacy Board get involved?
If I, as a physician, don’t want to do abortions, and a woman comes to me in my private office asking for one, am I, as the medical ‘ethicists’ (again, loose term…) would say, ‘obligated’ to refer her to someone who does them? Let me think about that one for a microsecond: NOT!