A follow up to this post from April about laws being drafted that would allow health care professionals to refuse service to people for ‘moral reasons’.
Neil Noesen, a relief pharmacist at the Kmart in Menomonie, Wis., was the only person on duty one day in 2002 when a woman came in to refill her prescription for the contraceptive Loestrin FE. According to a complaint filed by the Wisconsin department of regulation and licensing, Noesen refused because of his religious opposition to birth control. – Time.com
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but if you want to refuse services to clients because of religous or other equally vague ‘moral’ objections, get the hell out of the health care profession.
Naturally, some of the Anti-Abortion wacko’s are lobbying the state to not punish this guy, which only re-enforces the wacko-ism of a particularly radical group of people. It’s times like this I wish I were arguing the other side of the case in front of a judge.
“Mrs. Anti-Abortion Wacko, you claim that any doctor should be able to refuse service to someone because of any ‘moral’ objections the doctor might have. If you, Mrs. Anti-Abortion Wacko, were to be in need of critical care or life saving prescriptions, but were denied that treatment because the doctor disagreed with your perverted sense morality, should that be legal as well? Or only if the doctors agree with other like-minded Wackos such as yourself?”
Of course, logic doesn’t hold up in the parrallel universe a lot of the radical anti-abortion people inhabit, so I wouldn’t expect much of a logical response.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
Yeah. Bottom line: if you’re going to select a certain few who are the Keepers of Medication, then these select few have a duty to dispense such medication to everyone.
It’s simple: either do away with the restriction of who can dispense meds, or make sure those who can dispense meds actually do.
Otherwise, you have a psuedo-government based on subjective morality telling you what’s right and wrong (as opposed to what’s legal and illegal).
I don’t think it was right to refuse the service in this case ONLY because there was nobody else there to distribute the birth control to the customer. If there had been somebody else there, I think it would have been perfectly acceptable to get a different pharmacist to give the lady birth control. If there isn’t anybody else, though, the worker is SOL .. he would “need” to distribute the prescription. I don’t think the person should be required to “get the hell out of the health care profession”.
If somebody in the military (for example) wanted to get out of Iraq due to his/her religious beliefs, would you support that decision?
If somebody in the military (for example) wanted to get out of Iraq due to his/her religious beliefs, would you support that decision?
I would most likely support that decision, and so does the US government.. They allow for military personal to claim ‘conscientious objector’ status which allows them to serve in non-combat roles like education, health care, and media type jobs.
That pretty much ties in with my thoughts on the health care issue above.. If you want to claim ‘conscientious objector’ status in the health care industry, thats fine, but you should expect to be moved off the ‘front lines’ as well.