{"id":7029,"date":"2004-11-10T14:20:23","date_gmt":"2004-11-10T21:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2004\/11\/10\/moral-choice.html"},"modified":"2004-11-10T14:20:23","modified_gmt":"2004-11-10T21:20:23","slug":"moral_choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/11\/10\/moral_choice.html","title":{"rendered":"Moral choice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hypothetical: A new drug treatment is developed that suppresses homosexuality. It is made legal. Should a doctor be compelled to prescribe the treatment should someone ask for it, even if he or she feels that it’s a terrible thing to do? Should a doctor be allowed to decline such treatment (with a reference, perhaps, to someone who is willing to do so)? And should a pharmacist, similarly horrified at the treatment, be allowed to decline to stock the medication or sell it?<\/em><\/p>\n

Hypothetical: A new drug treatment is developed that will gradually make black people look white — reducing the melanin in the skin, unkinking the hair, altering certain facial features, etc. It has minimal ill side effects. Some black people choose to take this medication voluntarily, because they want to “pass” in a prejudiced world. Some white parents adopting black babies choose to use it on them, to make them “more like us.” Should a physician be compelled to write a prescription for this drug treatment? Should an insurance company be required to pay for it if a doctor okays it as essential to the emotional health of the recipient? Should a pharmacist have to dispense those pills, even if they think it is a sick, twisted, racist thing to do to a child?<\/em><\/p>\n

A parallel story<\/a> has come back to the headlines — parallel in terms of questioning what role the moral beliefs of a medical caregiver can or should play in the legal treatment that can be demanded of them.<\/p>\n

For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey’s prescription because she did not believe in birth control.<\/p>\n

“I was shocked,” says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. “Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It’s just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician.”<\/p>\n

Several states have — and other are considering — laws to allow medical care providers, including pharmacists, to do just that. It’s not couched, of course, as “regulating what people take or do.” Just the opposite, in fact, as it’s ostensibly to prevent doctors and pharmacists from being “regulated to do” something that they morally object to. <\/p>\n

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.<\/p>\n

In Madison, Wis., a pharmacist faces possible disciplinary action by the state pharmacy board for refusing to transfer a woman’s prescription for birth-control pills to another druggist or to give the slip back to her. He would not refill it because of his religious views.<\/p>\n

And I can see the argument there, too. If I refuse to sell someone a gun because I think he’s going to shoot his wife with it, it would be irresponsible — immoral, in fact — for me to give him directions to another gun shop that might be more accomodating.<\/p>\n

The situation hasn’t gotten any less thorny since I last tackled it<\/a> in April. That hasn’t kept some<\/a> from treating it all as a simplistic battle of Good vs Evil — with the role of Evil being played by … well …<\/p>\n

US druggists refuse to give out birth control because of “moral values”<\/strong>
\nA number of states have enacted (or may soon pass) laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if their beliefs (read: fundamentalist Christian dogma) dictate otherwise. […] Just in time for next season’s hotly anticipated coathanger abortion fad. Welcome to Jesusistan.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to see this all as some horrific Right Wing Bushie Jerry Falwell Conservative Christian Plot — and I’d even be willing to suggest that that there are those in the Christian Right who see this as a way to backdoor their way into preventing certain things they dislike.<\/p>\n

But it remains a more powerful and nuanced issue than that. If I object to providing you a service on moral grounds, under what circumstances can I be forced by the state to do so anyway? And a straightforward cuts both ways — whether it’s crazy fundie pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills, or wise and humanistic pharmacists refusing to dispense “straight” or “white” pills in my hypothetical.<\/p>\n

The danger, of course, is that this may mean that folks are unable to get treatment that they want, and are legally allowed to receive, if all the pharmacies in an area (especially a smaller, rural area) choose to not provide such a service. We’ve seen something similar happen with the increasing difficulty of women being able to find abortion services (though nobody has, on the flip side, yet argued that doctors should be compelled to learn how to perform abortions and provide them to anyone who asks).<\/p>\n

I still don’t know what the answer is. But I’m pretty certain that we’re not going to get to it by simply treating it all as some “Jesusistan” plot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hypothetical: A new drug treatment is developed that suppresses homosexuality. It is made legal. Should a doctor be compelled to prescribe the treatment should someone ask for it, even if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,25,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-gay-stuff","category-zt-pc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7037,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/11\/09\/colored_thinkin.html","url_meta":{"origin":7029,"position":0},"title":"Colored thinking","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 9-Nov-04 1:14pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Blacks die from heart failure at twice the rate of whites. 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