Pharmacists Refusing To Fill Birth Control & Morning After Prescriptions

I cannot begin to tell you how this pisses me off.  These pharmacists claim to refuse, on personal moral or religious grounds, to fill prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception ("morning after") pills.

These same pharmacists, however, fill prescriptions for Viagra and other drugs whose sole purpose is to give an impotent man an erection.  Now, let's face it: the primary reason most of the men are asking their doctors for Viagra is for the sole purpose of having sex.  These pharmacists do not require a sworn statement from the erection-seeking man stating that the erection if for the sole purpose of procreation.

On one of the news programs talking about this issue, one pharmacist (a man, what a surprise) said that Viagra was fine, since it was "all about loooooove".  Gag.  What about girls and women who need the morning after pill because of rape or incest?  Is that looooooove?  Or girls and women who need to combination of hormones to regulate their monthly cycles so that they don't end up missing several days of school or work each month?  Or end up butchering the idiot males in their lives who make PMS and on-the-rag jokes?

What about married women who, for a variety of reasons, do not want or cannot safely bear children?  Yes, they could have their tubes tied, but so could their husbands have a vasectomy.  Is any woman out there surprised that, despite the fact that vasectomies are less complicated to do, have fewer risks associated with the sugery and post-op recovery, and fewer long-term health consequences than tubal ligations, that more women get "fixed" than do their male partners?  Using a less drastic form but highly effective of birth control, such as birth control pills, leaves the couple's future options open.  About the only time a man undergoes a reverse vasectomy is when he dumps Wife #1 for a younger one.

Speaking of alternative forms of birth control, do this paragons of moral and religious rectitude work in pharmacies where ::gasp:: condoms are sold?  What about spermicidal products?  If so, why aren't they refusing to sell those? 

Many of these pharmacists aren't just quietly telling the woman "no, go somewhere else to get this filled."  Even when there are other pharmacists or pharmacy techs working in the same pharmacy who have no objection to filling contraceptive prescriptions, these paragons aren't passing the scripts along to their willing co-workers.  Some are lecturing, even hectoring, the women.

Well, I say  --well, no, I'm not going to write what I'd say or do were some hypocrite of a pharmacist do that in my presence. 

What I think is that if these pharmacists want to, on moral or religious grounds, refuse to fill birth control and emergency contraception ("morning after") pills, fine.  Then they should also be refusing to fill Viagra and Levitra and related erectile dysfunction prescriptions, and pull from their shelves all the condoms and spermicides.

I'd say they should also march down to their local Children and Family Services department and sign on to be foster parents, since there are few enough foster homes for all the kids out in the system right now…a system that is going to become even more heavily populated as these moral and religious pharmacists contribute to yet more pregnancies that are unwanted or where the parent(s)-to-be cannot, for a variety of reasons, properly raise the results.  But I wouldn't want these paragons raising any more paragons.

People never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions. - Blaise Pascal

Melissa