Should pharmacists be forced to fill legal prescriptions they personally object to on moral grounds?
☆ElenaDiamond☆
2012/07/08 12:50:07
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Pharmacists are expected to fill any valid, legal
prescription issued by a physician. However, dispensing some drugs, like Plan-B,
puts some pro-life pharmacists into a personal moral dilemma. If they
do not fill the prescription they are interfering with a doctor-patient
relationship, but if they do, they are facilitating something they
consider immoral.
prescription issued by a physician. However, dispensing some drugs, like Plan-B,
puts some pro-life pharmacists into a personal moral dilemma. If they
do not fill the prescription they are interfering with a doctor-patient
relationship, but if they do, they are facilitating something they
consider immoral.
Top Opinion
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Bob, the reasonable one 2012/07/08 14:31:01
Conversely, a pharmacist who works for a publicly traded (government) corporation doesn't have a choice. He or she has to do what his/her boss tells him/her to do--up to and including, ultimately, the government. Don't wanna sell the Morning After pill on account of religious reservations? Fine. Start your own pharmacy or find another line of work.
Pardon the expression, but WTF! I'm real tired of this kind of crappola.........
If there is someone else who does not morally object that can fill the prescription, then by all means, they should be the ones filling it. BUT a prescription is a prescription, and it is NOT their place to decide whether or not a person needs it. For all they know, they could be *saving* a life and allowing for more lives to later be created. They don't know that. They don't know, because they are not the person's doctor, do not know their history, do not know the situation.
They are there to fill the prescription and make sure that it doesn't conflict with any other medications the person is on. End of story.
Edit: Nice block. Your loss. Do your job, or don't go into that field. Nobody should have to go to another town because a person cannot do their job.
I wonder, for the people who answered no... what if it were against their religion to fill a cancer drug? Would your answer still be no?
It's no different than conscientious objector status in the military.
Pharmacist don't handle pot, and Oregon is the only state which offers assisted euthanasia.
If we are going to be multicultural then we need to allow for these differences and understand this sort of thing will come up.
If you want to say it's a person, fine, but medically speaking it isn't anything more than maybe a potential person, depending on whether conception has occurred. Btw, there is no test to determine either way right after sex.
Thus, I don't think denying medication on religious reasons without moral or ethical considerations should be tolerated.
Science is not clear about when "human Life" begins, thus there is a valid moral stance on this issue. I've heard all the arguments, they are all based on arbitrary and contrived definitions and considerations. Reasonable people are going to have differing opinions and differing beliefs. And legal definitions are just as controversial.
If you take the scientific definition of "life" and the scientific definition of "human being" a valid argument can be made based in science that human life begins at fertilization. If you throw in more nebulous issues like thought, or feeling, or ability to survive outside the womb, or "potential" to have these things you can arrive at different conclusions, but those are hardly scientific and delve more into the philosophical. And these issues are a very slippery slope. A recent ethics article argues that after birth abortions (infanticide) should be allowed.
http://jme.bmj.com/content/ea...
Their argument potentially suggests killing perfectly healthy toddlers, maybe up to a few years old, before they become self-aware and can think a bit to establish a goal. If this position were to be adopted by society, and it might, people should be allowed to refuse to participate. Especially...
Science is not clear about when "human Life" begins, thus there is a valid moral stance on this issue. I've heard all the arguments, they are all based on arbitrary and contrived definitions and considerations. Reasonable people are going to have differing opinions and differing beliefs. And legal definitions are just as controversial.
If you take the scientific definition of "life" and the scientific definition of "human being" a valid argument can be made based in science that human life begins at fertilization. If you throw in more nebulous issues like thought, or feeling, or ability to survive outside the womb, or "potential" to have these things you can arrive at different conclusions, but those are hardly scientific and delve more into the philosophical. And these issues are a very slippery slope. A recent ethics article argues that after birth abortions (infanticide) should be allowed.
http://jme.bmj.com/content/ea...
Their argument potentially suggests killing perfectly healthy toddlers, maybe up to a few years old, before they become self-aware and can think a bit to establish a goal. If this position were to be adopted by society, and it might, people should be allowed to refuse to participate. Especially nurses and doctors who entered the field before society made killing toddlers legal. No doctor should be forced to euthanize a 6 month old baby if that practice was unethical when they entered the field. No pharmacist should be forced to provide a prescription for a drug to kill a 1 year old because someone makes it legal. This philosophy if extended may allow killing grown people as long as they are unconscious, sleeping, or in a drug induced state and just "potentially" might wake up in the morning since at the moment of murder they did not have any conscious "aims".
You might think these things too far fetched. But the suggestion to allow infanticide is in the Journal of Medical Ethics. This is a totally serious suggestion they are making. You might even support it, I don't know, but you reference the "potential person" and that is exactly the argument in the JME. In a few generations it might be just like taking out the trash to take your 6 month old to the doctor for euthanasia because you are tired of taking care of a baby. The people in the future might look back at us as unenlightened trolls because we didn't allow killing 6 month olds, or 1 years olds, or 3 year olds; it's hard to tell where the new line will be drawn.
The issue is that morals and ethics will vary in a multicultural society especially since people are changing the moral code so fast, so we need to allow for that and let individuals opt out of some of these situations where there are valid arguments supporting multiple moral positions. And especially where the moral code shifts after they have entered the field.
I am speaking of the science where the Day-After-Pill is concerned. At that stage (the day after sex) it is more unlikely that the egg will have been fertilized. Moreover, even if it was fertilized, it has not reached the stage of being a fetus, which by medical definition is what an unborn child is.....In fact, it isn't even in the embryonic stage, just a blastocyst. There is no scientific evidence to support that we are persons at conception (only potential persons), but there is a ton of evidence that in order to be born as a person we must become one first. Since infanticide was more common before abortion became safe I don't believe they were more moral back then. If the pharmacist has a right to object to prescribing and the woman has a right to medical treatment, how do we bridge that gap? Just saying, "they can go across the street" is not a good answer if there is no other place close by as time is of the essence - 2-3 days at most after sex - to use the Day-After-Pill.
Like the chick-filet...church going owner..not open on sunday...and the world did not come to an end. And the pharmacy up the street, not open 24 hours, had to find a different one for that midnight prescription fill.
I don't find variety objectionable.