No Emergency Pill For You?

By Cathy Lynn Grossman
From the “Faith and Reason” Blog
USA TODAY

There's a fast way to tell someone's point of view on the sale of contraceptives.

People who think pharmacists who oppose abortion should not be required to sell the "morning- after pill" call laws to support these "conscience laws." People who think women should have access to legal medications they need call them "refusal laws."

According to Religion News Service,

In 2005, then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich issued a ruling to force "pharmacies to fill prescriptions without making moral judgments.

But when the state tried to enforce this, two pharmacists, aided by the American Center for Law and Justice, went to court for the right to refuse. Tuesday, Circuit Judge John Belz wrote that governor's ruling was unconstitutional, that it would be...

... coercing individuals or entities to provide healthcare services that violate their belief.

The pharmacists and the ACLJ are delighted. The ruling affects commercial pharmacies as well as individuals who might pick and choose which FDA-approved legal medications they believe should be dispensed. As the Center's site notes, the judge's ruling points out:

Even as to emergency contraception, the Court heard no evidence of a single person who ever was unable to obtain emergency contraception because of a religious objection.

Meanwhile, The state's attorney general is appealing and the American Civil Liberties Union is joining in. Colleen K. Connell, Illinois ACLU director pointed out:

The court's ruling fails to account for the important constitutional rights at issue when women are denied access to reproductive health care and medication.

The battle over whose conscience trumps whose medical choices is far wider than Illinois, of course. It puts health workers who bring their faith and values to their jobs in tension with their clients, patients and customers who may have different beliefs on whether or when to have children.

The ACLU is tracking cases state by state and in Congress and finds this tension goes beyond contraception issues. Some example: Congress is looking at:

• Efforts to prevent birth control from being included as part of the preventive care package of health care reform.
• Congress is considering a bill to allow hospitals to refuse to provide a pregnant woman with an abortion, even if the procedure would save her life.
• A bill before the South Carolina legislature would allow health care providers and facilities to refuse to participate in abortions and other reproductive health services, with no exclusions for emergency care and no provision for a lifesaving abortion.
• A bill before the Alabama legislature would allow any institution, health care provider, or health insurance company to refuse to provide any referral, procedure, or payment for any health care based on moral or religious objections.

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Sad;y, we watch as our society disintegrates before our eyes, and not just here, but in so many areas.  I belong to a generation, as does the generation before me, when these very ideas were literally unthinkable for the vast, vast majority of people.  Yet today, the leadership of our nation fights for these as “rights” and thinks themselves virtuous for doing so.  How have we become so backwards?

It has happened because our churches have left the preaching of the plain Word of God for the milk toast of pleasing men.  It has happened because we have decided that we are more concerned with feelings happy people than we are with seeing to it that we are pleasing our Lord and Master.  Truly, we are in the place of the slaves in the vineyard who are joyfully frolicking about because they have decided that the Master of the vineyard has gone away and left the care to them and will not return.  They will run it their way!

How very sad!  For He will one day return and I fear that that day approaches sooner than we think…