Local Pharmacist, Local Babykiller, or Local Quack?
By Irreligiosity on Mar 5, 2008 in Abortion Debate, Around the World, Basic Biology, Christianity, Featured, Freedom of Speech, Politics, Rational Thought, Religion, Science, Secularism, United States
The Wisconsin Senate is thinking of passing a bill that will force “conscientious objector” pharmacists to provide contraceptives and the morning after pill to individuals no matter their own personal beliefs on the matter, and boy are Christian groups in that state annoyed.
These Christian groups are trying to turn this into a complicated morality debate, but the entire situation can be boiled down to two conflicting views about when life starts: Science tells us that a high dosage of chemicals from the morning after pill prevents a fertilized egg from implanting itself on the wall of the uterus therefore preventing a pregnancy from ever happening. Religious leaders believe that a fertilized egg, a single cell that hasn’t even begun dividing and doesn’t have anything approaching consciousness, should be afforded the full rights that living humans who have had their cells divide a few billion times enjoy.
The usual histrionics are put into the article to try and make the plight of this single-celled potential human seem more endearing:
It is a medical fact that the morning-after pill (a high dosage of the birth control pill) and most, if not all, birth control drugs and devices including the intrauterine device (IUD), Depo Provera, Norplant, the Patch, and the Pill can act to terminate a pregnancy by chemically altering the lining of the uterus (endometrium) so that a newly conceived child is unable to implant in the womb, thus starving and dying.
It is a medical fact that a cell doesn’t implant in the uterus. That cell probably wasn’t going to implant anyways. Cells are regularly fertilized and then fail to implant all on their own without any help from pills, but you don’t see any crazy fundamentalist Christians shooting up the local church because of those millions of natural abortions God performs every day. The thing making its way through the woman’s body is not a child. It cannot feel pain. It can’t starve because it doesn’t even require nutrition unless it implants, which it won’t because of the contraceptive. It will just disappear into the body along with thousands of its fertilized brethren who are similarly fated to never enjoy the thrills of cellular mitosis.
So my question is simple, where is the definition of human life going to stop? Abortion rights activists were once happy to reserve their ire for abortionists who were going after fetuses that were well along in their development in the womb. There is even a certain point in fetal development when I’m willing to concede that abortion leans more towards killing a potential human, but that point definitely isn’t when a fertilized egg is floating around a woman’s body possibly getting ready to implant itself. The egg can’t feel anything. The egg is probably going to fall victim to God, nature’s most prolific abortionist, and fail to implant all on its own without the morning after pill stepping in and upping the odds.
The religious groups have come up with several other arguments that no doubt sounded compelling in their own minds when they were thinking them up. Pharmacists object because of health concerns, pharmacists object because of conscience, pharmacists have a free speech right to prevent people from using contraceptives. Here’s a hint for these groups since they haven’t caught on quite yet: if you have to rephrase your ludicrous religious belief system into equally ludicrous rational-sounding arguments then it’s probably time for you to realize that you’re siding with a lost cause and it’s time to give up. The bait-and-switch tactic of trying to preach religion in secular terms might work for your congregations that are well practiced in doublethink, but it isn’t fooling anyone else.
I think this quote from Wisconsin pro-life activist Peggy Hamill sums up the religious position quite nicely, though not in the way she likely intended:
Simply wishing something to be true does not make it so.
You might want to sit and think long and hard about your advice, Peggy. The morning after pill and birth control don’t cause abortions. You can’t abort something that was never there to begin with. Even if it was an abortion (which it isn’t, legally or biologically, I can’t emphasize this enough), abortions are perfectly legal in the United States and the argument could be made that the law is broken if someone is prevented access to perfectly legal medications.
Pharmacists aren’t exercising any sort of freedom of speech when they refuse to prescribe said pill. What they are doing is violating their professional obligation and imposing their irrational religious beliefs about life and sexuality on other people. Leave it to the church to oppose a bill that clarifies and forces them to obey the law of the land and claim that their freedom of speech and freedom of choice is being infringed when they’re the ones actively trying to do it to everyone else around them.
Technorati Tags: morning after pill, pharmacists, birth control, abortion, religion, christian groups, pro-life, pro-choice
The Barefoot Bum | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
the entire situation can be boiled down to two conflicting views about when life starts
Actually, the entire situation can be boiled down to the special ethical system that controls medical care, a system that has evolved over thousands of years. We demand that *everyone* in the medical profession act in the patients’ best interests, not their own. Full stop, no exceptions. If you can’t do that, go sell used cars.
the chaplain | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
There was a pretty good post and discussion about this issue at No More Hornets a couple of weeks ago.
On the one hand, Barefoot Bum’s solution intuitively makes a lot of sense to me. If one knows that one cannot perform all of the typical duties of a job or profession, one should not work in that field.
On the other hand, it seems that if pharmacists, doctors, etc., want to offer limited, selective services in their field, they should be able to do so. Of course, they should also inform the public of the limits to their services so that the public can make informed choices about care providers. The problem with this solution is that it only works in situations (such as densely populated urban and suburban areas) in which consumers have an abundance of choices readily available. There are too many locales in which this is not the case. Therefore, it seems that the fairest thing to do is to revert to Barefoot Bum’s solution.