I know that the headline of this post sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not. Arizona recently passed a law that allows health care workers and pharmacists to refuse women access to reproductive health care if they feel that it goes against their conscience. The state’s bill is no different than the federal guidelines that say the same thing. If a pharmacists feels that it is immoral to fill a prescription for birth control or emergency contraception, they can do so. And if a doctor feels that it’s immoral to prescribe birth control to a woman, they can do so. USA Today has a story of one doctor who did just that.
Faced with a request to give an unmarried female patient a prescription for birth control pills, Dr. Michele Phillips looked to her conscience for the answer.
“I’m not going to give any kind of medication I see as harmful,” said Phillips of San Antonio. The drugs would not protect her patient from “emotional trauma from multiple partners,” Phillips reasoned, or sexually transmitted diseases. “I could not ethically give that type of medication to a single woman.”
Which brings me back to my question: are conscience clauses ethical? I don’t think they are. If I go to a pharmacy to fill a prescription, the pharmacist should fill the prescription – that’s their job. If I ask for an over the counter medicine like Plan B, they should give it to me – no questions asked. If I, Goddess forbid, were to get raped and wind up in an emergency room, they sure as hell better give me emergency contraception if I ask for it. It’s not the business of doctors, nurses, or pharmacists to impose a sense of morality on the world. If that’s what they want to do for a job, they should have gone into the ministry instead of the health care industry. [Read more...]
We recently broke the bad news about a new abortion law in Oklahoma that requires information about women who obtain abortions to be published on a public website. One aspect of the law that has received less attention, however, is that the new bill changes the definition of pregnancy. According to 
There is a lot of misconceptions about mifepristone, also known as RU-486 or the abortion pill. Many on the anti-choice side say that mifepristone is the same as emergency contraception, which is also known as Plan B, but they are not the same thing.
This summer the FDA approved the generic version of Plan B, the 
The Montana Attorney General has approved the language of a proposed constitutional amendment that would define a fetus as a “person” from the moment of conception. Two groups, Montana Pro Life Coalition and Personhood USA, are organizing the petition drive to get enough signatures for the personhood amendment to make its way to the ballot. They’re need 44,000 signatures to make that happen.
First of all, my apologies for the brevity of content today. I woke up yesterday to a dead laptop. My cat managed to spill a glass of water on top of the computer. And I think the rest of the story is self explanatory. Hopefully the nice geeks at the Genius Bar will give me a new laptop and get me back in business within a day. I think a low-cut shirt should help my cause. Thank goodness for extended warranties and external hard drives.
Finally – a good piece of pro-choice news to report. Today the 
