Next time you’re in a pharmacy, take a closer look at those folks in white coats.
They’re on the front lines in a war of conscience versus contraceptives.
Last week, I was at the opening of the Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly, one of the few pharmacies in the nation that stocks no birth-control pills or other contraceptives such as condoms. I spotted a man in a business suit standing near the cash register.
He told me a gripping story of being caught between his convictions as a Catholic and his job as a manager in a top pharmacy chain.
“All oral contraceptives work through homicide as they cause the conceived and developing baby to fail to implant in the uterus,” he said. “Or they prevent the release of the egg or the travel of the sperm.
“Most people do not realize that all birth control is an abortificaient. I have faced the question of how this medication works. As a professional, it’s a violation of moral law if a chemical kills a child.”
Up until a year ago, when he became a Catholic and had a heart-to-heart talk with a priest at a well-known parish in Northern Virginia, he was dispensing contraceptives at his pharmacy. Now he’s arranged for other employees to do so.
Still, he asked that I not use his name. Pharmacists like him are being fired across the country, he said, even when they raise legitimate questions about birth-control pills.
“After five years of birth control use,” he told me, “there is increased risk of cancer because of the estrogen and progesterone,” the hormones in the pills.
I did a quick Internet search, and sure enough, sites such as drkoop.com and BBC News were saying the same thing.
Pharmacists’ rights to refuse to dispense birth control would be wiped away in the case of a Democratic sweep of the White House and Congress next week. One pending bill, the Freedom of Choice Act, would nullify conscience-protection laws in at least nine states.
Wisconsin does not have such a law. Neil Noesen, a Catholic pharmacist at a Kmart there, got his license restricted because he refused to give out oral contraceptives to a woman in 2002. The Wisconsin Supreme Court turned down his appeal in June .
The trends are becoming more like Illinois, where Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, signed a bill on April 1, 2005, requiring pharmacists to dispense birth control.
Hillel Hellinger, an Orthodox Jew in Miami Beach, says the Illinois law has spooked pharmacists like himself nationwide.
“I don’t think that anybody should dictate to the pharmacist what he or she should sell,” he said. As a pharmacist for Rite Aid in the early 1990s, he refused to sell condoms, as Jewish law forbids men to not waste “seed” (sperm). He ended up suing Rite Aid for firing him over his religious beliefs.
He won that lawsuit, but when he applied for a pharmacist’s position with Eckerd Corp., he was turned down on the argument that his refusal to sell condoms and certain forms of birth control constituted a burden for the corporation.
“Once I expressed an idea of a moral issue, I became taboo, and no one wanted to deal with me,” he said. He sued Eckerd in 2000, but lost.
“Pharmacies accommodate people who don’t work during the Sabbath,” he said. “Not selling certain products is the same issue.”
• Julia Duin’s Stairway to Heaven column runs Thursdays and Sundays. Contact her at jduin@washingtontimes.com.
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