While reading the excellent journal of ginmar, I ran across this item:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — Gov. Rod Blagojevich approved an emergency rule Friday requiring pharmacies to fill birth control prescriptions quickly after a Chicago pharmacist refused to fill an order because of moral opposition to the drug.
…
The Chicago pharmacist was not the first to attract attention for refusing to fill a birth control prescription.

In February, a judge recommended that a Roman Catholic pharmacist in Wisconsin be reprimanded and required to attend ethics classes after the pharmacist blocked a woman’s attempt to fill a prescription for birth control pills in 2002.

Is it just me, or are pharmacy schools graduating an unusually high number of pharmacists who have a moral objection to birth control? This issue come up suspiciously often:

BoingBoing noted the issue on November 10th, 2004.

Yahoo has a long list of stories on it.

The NYT’s Paul Krugman has a sobering column on it and on religious extremism in general in his March 29 “What’s Going On?” piece. Go there and read the whole damn thing, repeatedly. It’s worth quoting full-length, but here’s the most hair-raising part:

Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through “Terri’s law.” But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice – a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge’s order that she remain there.

And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.

The religious right is already having a big impact on education: 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom.

But medical care is the cutting edge of extremism.

Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.

And it won’t stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward “conscience” or “refusal” legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation.

Although there are grass roots activists working to raise public concsiousness about the issue of “pharmacists rights,” (the right to refuse to dispense drugs on moral grounds), there are plenty of laws on the books or coming down the pike in many states that will guarantee just this.

It seems that living in Illinois is good for a woman’s health.

However, what I originally wanted to know is – are the number of pharmacists who object to dispensing birth control representative of the general population’s views on reproductive choice? Or is the number higher than it ought to be?

The Minnesota Women’s Press (we’ve got to re-take the word “feminist,” people!) notes that the APhA (American Pharmacists’ Association) has 50,000 members – and the association “endorsed a pharmacist’s right to refuse to dispense medication that goes against their moral or religious convictions” as long as another pharmacist is available or on duty to dispense it. The article also notes that Walgreen’s and CVS pharmacies have policies that support this objection clause.

Apparently the kicker for their cause was that 1998 was also the year that “emergency contraception” (EC) was approved by the FDA:

Emergency contraception is a high dose of ordinary birth control that, when taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse, is 75 percent to 89 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. For the past 30 years, physicians and nurse practitioners have known that high doses of regular birth control could prevent pregnancy, but it was not available in a stand-alone package until 1998. Instead, physicians would prescribe a full month of pills for the woman to take at once. Before EC, pharmacists would not have known whether a woman intended to use a prescription as regular birth control or emergency contraception.

But now, led by the 1,600-member anti-choice organization Pharmacists for Life International, there are increasing reports of pharmacists who refuse to fill any prescriptions for birth control medication.

And the rest of that article is horrifying, too. There’s one group of pro-life pharmacists that’s 1600 members strong, and there’s the Federal Refusal Clause that prohibits “local, state and federal authorities from requiring any institution or health care worker to provide or pay for abortions, or make any abortion-related referrals.” The FDA turned down a proposal to make EC available over-the-counter, thus circumventing religious extremism in pharmacies by making it possible to purchase an emergency dose of “morning after pills” privately and without pharmacist intervention. The costs of birth control pills have skyrocketed, and low-cost state-funded medical clinics that serve low-income women report having to refer these women elsewhere, or have only limited options to offer.

What it boils down to is a quiet, very effective campaign to limit women’s access to the full range of reproductive choices that are available, because simply refusing to fill a woman’s prescription for birth control pills may intimidate her into not getting it filled at all out of embarassment or self-doubt. It may not be a directed plan by religious extremists to pack the pharmacy schools with their partisans, but it sure smells like their brand of strategery.

PBS’s News Hour reported in 2001 that there was a shortage of skilled pharmacists, for example

Thank God – somebody has published a diary at Daily Kos on this.

And Media Matters rolled the rock over that “Pharmacists for Life” hides under, too.

Yeesh. I’d hate to be young, unmarried, and unsure about birth control these days. It seems like the choices are narrowing, and that’s no accident.