Who’s Rights

Now here is a new debate that I have heard nothing about until now, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5490-2005Mar27.html" target="_new">Pharmacists' Rights (free subscription required)</a>. This amounts to a Pharmacists right to deny a women a birth control prescription if it violates their personal moral or religious beliefs. <br />n<br />nHow smart it is to jump into a conversation about "reproductive rights" after My Darling Wife and I so enraged <a href="http://www.patiastephens.com/index.htm" target="_new">Patia</a> over our stand that <a href="http://nowherethoughts.net/sarpysam/archives/842-Confused.html" target="_new">all people are created equal</a> whether they are men, women, white, black, red, yellow, purple, or green may not be real brilliant but I find this Pharmacists' Rights so unbelievable as to defy imagination.<br />n<br />nDon't get me wrong, Pharmacists have the right to their moral convictions but I have no concept what the problem is with dispensing birth control pills. Aren't there enough unwanted children in the world without adding more to the mix? Birth control pills, whether you agree with todays moral code or not that allows casual sex with no commitments as a part of everyday life, are one bullet in a range of products to help women who don't want to have children. This is very important and Pharmacists denying them to women appears to me to fall into the category of hurting people instead of helping them.<br />n<br />nNow the morning after pill discussed in the article falls under a little different category. Does life actually start at the moment of fertilization or once the egg attaches itself to the womb? That's a question we will never know the answer to but everybody has their own idea on the situation. I feel until the egg attaches itself to the womb it is not actually a life so any probation about taking a life does not apply. I can understand where other people might feel different which is why I say this falls a little different.<br />n<br />nWhat is so unbelievable about all of this is the Pharmacists not transferring the prescription to another pharmacy if they will not fill it. This has to violate some kind of law or ethical code. I can't believe that it doesn't. While I may not agree with a Pharmacists personal moral or religious beliefs that keeps them from filling a prescription, I can understand their stand but not agree with it, but to not transfer the prescription is wrong, period.<br />n<br />nI just can't understand what is going on in society that leads to such things. If you want to help people, help them, don't use religion to hurt them. That's not what Christianity today should be about even though more and more it is being used that way. How sad.<br />n<br />n<b>Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date. George Bernard Shaw</b><br />n<br />