Guest post up this week by my dear friend, Will Lester. Although he’s not a blogger himself, Will’s perspective on an issue very dear to my heart needed to be shared beyond our classroom. Speaking to a point of contention addressed in my Gender and Women’s Studies course this semester, Will’s argument against gendered rights to body regulation and protection is not only relevant, but valuable to current feminist discourse. Coming from a self-proclaimed (young & white & middle class & female) feminist, this argument has far less weight. Will’s assertions prove this argument is universal to men and women advocating for human rights in our nation and is not solely a “feminine” concern.
Follow Will on Twitter & Tumblr: @lester1321/lester1321.tumblr.com
“Recently, a gender and women’s studies major asked me to verify a medical dilemma that was brought up in one of her classes. She asked me,
“In the United States, can a pharmacist deny a patient a filled prescription at their discretion because of their religious beliefs?”
My father is a physician, and given my experience with him at his job and my relationship with the pharmacists that he works with every day, I assumed that the answer was no as long as the prescription was legitimately from a physician. I had heard of pharmacists delaying filling the order while calling the prescribing physicians to verify prescriptions should the order seem out of place, but I had never heard of a flat-out denial of medication because of personal beliefs. However, upon further investigation, six states in the United States (Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota) have laws that allow pharmacists to refuse prescriptions for women’s contraceptives because of their personal, religious beliefs (nwlc.org). Other states (Kansas, for instance) have similar laws providing protections for pharmacists should they refuse prescriptions because of their beliefs (thinkprogress.org). The pharmacists denying the prescriptions do not just work at private institutions, but chain pharmacies such as Rite Aid and Walgreens as well. This puzzles me not just because of the blatant disregard for patient care, but because I know that I could go into any Walgreens or Rite Aid and buy a pack of condoms. This is where I see a division because of gender, and I feel that it is an injustice.
Gender discrimination is a problem in any facet of popular culture, but I feel that this discrimination is a much more serious problem in the field of medicine. Lives are at stake, and the patient’s care should take precedence over any physician’s (or in this case, pharmacist’s) self-righteous attitude. Pharmacists are not doctors, so they do not take the Hippocratic oath. However, they take a similar oath (which varies according to the licensing board) that contains the same message: “do no harm.” Aside from its obvious use as a contraceptive, birth control can be used as a hormone regulator to protect against female cancers and relieve intense symptoms of menstruation. I feel that denying filling a woman’s legitimate prescription for birth control, regardless of its intended use by the prescribing physician, contradicts the pharmacists’ oath, and that if a pharmacist is uncomfortable filling every prescription legitimately provided by a physician, they should not have chosen their profession. The fact that it is perfectly legal in the United States to buy contraception, both male and female, promotes gender equality, but the fact that men can purchase contraceptives without the hassle of being denied because of someone else’s religious beliefs creates a gap between the genders.
The problem with this division is that I am unsure what can be done to reach gender equality with regards to purchasing contraceptives. Since this post is about gender and not politics, I am not going to get too far into the political aspects of this, but, as I mentioned in passing above, contraceptives are legal to purchase in the United States. The Affordable Care Act, which was fought by the same political ideologies that instituted the state laws allowing the denial of prescription birth control because of personal belief, is now federal law, and it allows government-provided healthcare to cover birth control with little to no co-pay. I may have been able to understand if the state laws predated the federal laws (by some number of years… maybe…), but most of the laws I’ve seen were signed into state legislation as a response to the Affordable Care Act. That frustrates me, but that’s as far as I’m going into the political debate. As far as solutions to shortening the gap, I suppose the state laws could be challenged in court (and eventually, they probably will be). Regardless, I feel that it is wrong for pharmacists to deny contraceptives to women based on personal belief, and it greatly disappoints me that this is even an issue. Women should be afforded contraception as easily as men, and hopefully, someone that has been affected by this discrimination will challenge these state laws and have them overturned.”
For more information regarding restricted access to contraception in the United States:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/05/16/485092/kansas-pharmacists-block-birth-control/
http://www.nwlc.org/resource/pharmacy-refusals-101
