Communist America
Apparently, now the government can tell stores what they have to stock. That's right, Illinois and now Massachusetts are requiring Walmart carry the morning-after pill. It is illegal to not carry it. This sort of high-handedness on the part of the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy and the Illinois government should infuriate everyone. Why? Because telling a store that they have to carry a good is one of the most intrusive things I have ever heard of a government doing. And for the people who started the lawsuit? Apparently all pretense of "pro-choice" is out the window. We aren't allowed to have a choice anymore. In their eyes, it's pro-abortion OR ELSE. Either that or they are too lazy to go get their morning-after pill at CVS or another pharmacy, it has to be at Wal-Mart. They want to be free to make their choices without us being free to make ours. This childishness smacks of the attitude some adopt as teenagers when they try to pressure their peers to make the same bad decisions they are making so they won't have to feel so guilty about making them themselves. I doubt it will happen, but I hope Walmart (and every single person interested in freedom) fights back.
posted by Xana Ender @ 10:47 AM
3 Comments:
At 11:13 PM,
Anonymous said…
not to diminish the wrongness of forcin gthem to carry the drug... but i believe that it is still legal for pharmacists to refuse to fill theprescription if they have moral issues with it.......
At 6:10 PM,
Anonymous said…
I bet they'll outlaw moral objections before long too... arn't MD's required to write birth control prescriptions even if they're opposed? I can't remember the outcome of that hullabaloo. At least I as a veterinarian can still refuse to euthanize a pet based on personal moral objections.
At 10:48 AM,
Bob said…
A. Doctors have had conscience-clause rights for quite a while, and there seems to be no likely-hood of that changing anytime soon. I should point out that States do vary on exactly how much duty to refer, etc, various physicians have if they refuse to prescribe or reccomend a given treatment. In general, if a failure to refer promptly, or at least mention the availibility of a given therapy falls below the accepted standard of care, or robs a patient of the ability to make informed consent to the options that the doctor does mention, then the conscience-clause protection doesn't apply.
B. Conscience-clause exceptions for pharmacists are a very new idea, with the oldest starting in 1998. Traditionally, the legal system thought of pharmacists as equivalent to clerks at 7-11 (i.e. if you have moral objections to selling beer, cigarettes, or Playboy, the state has no business preventing the owner of the 7-11 from firing you.)
C. In states with a conscience-clause protection for individual pharmacists, I'm not sure that I'm extremely upset about state laws forcing Wal-Mart to carry (or not carry) a given drug. Given that wal-mart (and to a lesser extent, Miejers, CVS, etc) have driven most of the competition out of the market, in some areas, when a state grants a pharmacy license to a wal-mart, they are effectively allowing the wal-mart to establish a regional monopoly. In the context of the way other state-granted monopolies are regulated (espicially railroads and utilities) forcing wal-mart to carry a drug seems pretty standard. Usually, as a condition of their operating license, if a jewish firm buys a railroad, they cannot refuse to transport hogs, and a muslim power company cannot refuse to provide electrical service to strip clubs and abortion clinics. Nothing requires a given wal-mart to seek a pharmacy license, but if they do, in a state where the majority of the electorate wants to force them to carry a certain drug, I'm not sure that it really is that much of a tragedy.
As long as it stays at the state-level, I just don't think it is that much of an issue.
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