Today's Rapid City Journal features a guest piece by Rapid City pharmacist Melissa Stahlecker, Pharm.D.
She addresses the controversy over pharmacists who exercise their conscience--and legal conscience clauses--to not dispense products that violate their conscience. In this case, contraceptives and abortafacients.
“My job” is not just to “dispense prescriptions that are legally prescribed by a doctor” as is stated. If that were the case, I could not be held accountable for recklessly dispensing a medication that I know has a high likelihood of harm through a drug interaction or for dispensing narcotics when I know they are not for a legitimate use. Your pharmacist always considers the risk, benefit, safety and necessity of medications as part of your health care. Your pharmacist is not a vending machine.
Of the frivolous argument that a pharmacist who doesn't want to dispense contraceptives or abortafacients should just "find another job," she says
One’s private and professional life cannot be compartmentalized; they are but parts of a larger whole. A health care right of conscience is firmly grounded in the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and freedom of speech; these rights are not suspended when the pharmacist walks through the door for work.
Stahlecker has a word for this integrated way of living: integrity
2 comments:
Dr. Stahlecker is correct. An attentive, professional pharmacist has saved my butt more than once when I wrote a prescription that could have been ineffective, at least, and potentially harmful in some cases. I do not want human vending machines dispensing drugs.
To those that say "Find another job," I say try to be a little more tolerant of those that believe differently from you.
Dr. Theo
Yes, isn't that amazing how such people scream about tolerance, unless or until it applies to them and their behavior!?!?!?! Two sets of rules, I guess!
I'm with you, Dr. Theo. I rather have the professional pharmacist you described. And someday, the intolerant ones, may wish that's exactly the type they had, but it might be too late to matter much what they wish anymore!
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