In 2019, Andrea Anderson’s primary birth control method had failed, so she called her health care provider to ask for a prescription to Ella, an emergency contraceptive tablet. But when she went to the local McGregor Thrifty White pharmacy in Aitkin County, Minnesota, pharmacist and local pastor George Badeaux refused to fill the prescription, citing his religious beliefs. He told her that a pharmacist working the following day could fill her needs if a snowstorm didn’t prevent the pharmacist from getting to work.The desperate woman ended up driving three hours round trip to Brainerd during a snowstorm to get her pregnancy-terminating pills.
Anderson sued under the Minnesota Human Rights Act, alleging sexual discrimination. The jury ruled against her.
Ethics Alarms verdict: the jury was right on the law, but the pharmacist was unethical.
The position here has been that conscience clauses for pharmacists are unethical: if a job involves filling prescriptions, then those who work for pharmacies can’t pick and choose which prescriptions to fill. That means that Badeaux was unethical to hold the job, and that the pharmacy is unethical for allowing someone to stay in the job who refuses to fill certain legal prescriptions for any reason, religious or not.
However, what matters here is the law, and refusing to fill a contraceptive prescription is not discriminatory just because the only individuals who are subject to it will be women. Presumably the pharmacist wouldn’t have sold the pills to a man either. Badeaux is an asshole, not a bigot.
The jury did find, however, that Badeaux and the pharmacy caused Anderson emotional distress worth $25,000. Good.
Now he needs to be removed from his job, not because of his religious beliefs, but because he can’t be trusted to deliver the services his profession is bound to deliver.
Ethics Alarms 
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/jury-awards-240000-muslim-truck-drivers-eeoc-religious-discrimination-suit
What was the basis for intentional infliction of emotional distress?
I get where you are coming from, but this principle would basically eliminate all Christians (or the ones who try to follow the faith) from being pharmacists at all. The same principle could also apply to abortion. It could force all Christians or anyone that is pro-life to not take jobs in medicine that might require performing an abortion.
I suppose we could live in a society like that, but it seems unnecessarily harsh to people who are pro-life.
This principle will also keep Muslims from being delivery drivers.
My pharmacist is a Christian, and he doesn’t see filling a prescription as being an assessory to an abortion. (I discussed this with him.) The principle is: don’t accept a job if you can’t fulfill its duties. You’re apparently siding with the County Clerk who refused to certify same sex marriages in Ky. One’s religion doesn’t allow one to do things like that without consequences. If a pharmacist asks for and receives permission to make exceptions, and all potential stakeholders consent after notice, OK. But in this case, the customer was a victim, and should not have been—and not treated in a very Christian manner.
I write this reply with all respect to you, so I don’t mean to be rude.
I also don’t mean to denigrate your pharmacist, but Christians in history and currently have fairly consistently maintained that abortion is murder and that a Christian cannot directly support that murder. Your pharmacist is acting inconsistently with his faith. Just because some Christians compromise the principles of the faith, it doesn’t follow they represent actual Christian teachings. Many Christians violate Christian principles on divorce and other things.
My concern with your position is that it would be forcing a Christian to commit an immoral action (in their own eyes). I also don’t see why your position wouldn’t also force a doctor to perform an elective abortion, and if they don’t like it, they can just not be a doctor or go work exclusively for a catholic hospital. Your principle would also force Christians to perform transgender surgery on an 11 year old or whatever else the left is pushing! At what point are we just throwing conscience clauses out the window?
Catholic theology is better worked out on this topic than Protestant, but Catholics rely on natural law to make the argument that abortion is wrong, so it’s not even a religious argument. The fetus has all the relevant characteristics for being human, it is innocent, and intentionally killing an innocent person is wrong.
There’s also a difference between formal cooperation with evil and material cooperation with evil. Formal cooperation with evil is directly donating to Planned Parenthood, and that would be considered wrong. Buying goods from a company that donates to Planned Parenthood is only a material cooperation with evil because the causal connection is too lose. If you were too strict on material cooperation, you would boycott paying taxes completely because some of your tax money goes to things you find immoral. That just doesn’t work.
I would maintain this position for other circumstances as well. I wouldn’t force a Muslim to sell pork.
There is a concern for people being a law unto themselves. You are 100% right that at some point, we can’t have someone claiming religious liberty and just not following the law in all circumstances. I don’t know where that line is (because we do need one), but that line can’t be with abortion. The stakes are too high.
Here’s a short article on the difference between formal and material cooperation with evil.
https://www.catholic.com/qa/material-and-formal-cooperation-with-evil
My concern with your position is that it would be forcing a Christian to commit an immoral action (in their own eyes).
Again, too bad. The job requires one to fill prescriptions, and it does not permit one to pick and choose which. Those Christians who view simply filling a prescription for a morning after pill a mortal sin have to do something else—there are a lot of options, after all. Most people who regard themselves as Christians do not hold to such strict beliefs on the topic.
I also don’t see why your position wouldn’t also force a doctor to perform an elective abortion, and if they don’t like it, they can just not be a doctor or go work exclusively for a catholic hospital.
Bad analogy. Doctors have specialties, and that is one. A general practitioner in a small town might face that dilemma. But presumably such a doctor would make it clear and apparent that he or she wouldn’t perform elective abortions, so any patient needing one would have plenty of time to plan accordingly.
Your principle would also force Christians to perform transgender surgery on an 11 year old or whatever else the left is pushing!
No, it wouldn’t. Transgender surgery is, again, a specialty: one would be pretty strange to settle on such an area and still be opposed to it. Moreover, trans gender surgery can be legitimately opposed as a violation of medical ethics, like elective cosmetic surgery.
At what point are we just throwing conscience clauses out the window?
You’ve provided nothing but straw men so far. A pharmacist is not a primary care provider, but just an agent on the doctor providing access to medicine. There is no justification for one to interfere with treatment.
Conscience clauses should be thrown out the window. If one can’t perform a job, one has no ethical right to seek or hold the job.
Conscience clauses arise from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I presume that in this case the pharmacist was an employee rather than the owner of the business. But if the pharmacist had been the owner then I can see nothing stopping the pharmacist from just not keeping the prescription in stock? After all a supermarket is not required to stock every type of cereal and a hardware shop is not required to stock every type of screwdriver.
Agree. In fact, at first I thought that George was the owner, and yes, that changes the equation materially.
As an aside, George Badeaux had been working as a pharmacist for over forty years at the time of this situation. This suggests that he entered the field long before such abortifacients were commercially available, and, at his age, would also find it extremely difficult to find comparable employment in a different field.
That is probably true, but the risks of any job are that technology will advance or that new product will come on the market that will require the employee to handle.
When I worked at a mail-order club years ago, the company came up with a website once it was clear the internet was here to stay. Several older women who worked there would pass off customers who were having problems with the website to escalated agents because the women didn’t know how our website worked and seemingly had no intention of learning. Part of their job was to help customers who called in for assistance but, for their unwillingness to expand their job skills, they were shirking that responsibility and keeping their value to the company limited.
I knew a man who, back in the 1960s, got a job at a gas station and refused to sell alcohol to customers. His boss was okay with that. Maybe he was just that valuable an employee. I don’t know the whole story. A customer once asked the boss, “Does he really not have to sell me liquor?” and the boss said that it was true. The employee was opposed to alcohol and his boss wouldn’t force him to be part of the transaction of it. But, the employee was working for a place that sold alcohol, so he should have found other work that didn’t mess with his conscience and let his boss find someone willing to do the whole job. This arrangement might have worked in the ’60s and ’70s. Now, though, no one working for a gas station should be allowed to refuse to sell alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets or unhealthy candy bars legally if a place of employment offers it for sale.
Pharmacists know that there are drugs that come along that have later proven to be dangerous or addictive. Suppose George decided that he would not fill prescriptions for certain pain killers because he felt the risk to the patient becoming hooked on them would be too much for his conscience? Suppose he refused to give COVID vaccines before they were approved by the FDA or, even, despite their approval? And, of course, there have been pharmacists who’ve refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills even for those women who have been prescribed them for medical reasons and not for conception prevention.
The thing is that the prescription is between the doctor and the patient to decide what is needed. As long as the drug is being provided legally, George shouldn’t be part of that decision.
“…prescription is between the doctor and the patient to decide what is needed.”
Not entirely though, a huge reason for pharmocology is to combat errors in drug interactions that could arise from multiple specialized doctors treating different conditions on the same patient. That’s not the only one though, many doctors don’t have the full picture by simple ignorance. Often a pharmacist will contact a prescribing doctor to make changes to all kinds of mundane but essential dosing, scheduling, and drug delivery details. Althogh much of this is now computerized, I’m sure there are still some cases of contact made to decipher the hand written ambiguities in a script that doctors are famous for.
Well, yes, as a stopgap against errors and advising of side effects, of course, that’s part of their job. It’s not their job to simply refuse to fill a prescription because they are opposed to its use entirely.
That is REALLY not true after the opioid crisis began. The government has taken licenses of numerous pharmacists for filling valid opioid prescriptions. They don’t go after the physicians because to convict the physicians of writing bogus prescriptions, you need other physicians to cooperate and state that the prescriptions were unnecessary and doctors don’t snitch on other doctors.
Lots of pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine and lvermectin and there isn’t even a religious belief there (unless you want to call the Democratic Party a cult). A local 27 year old pharmacist bragged on social media about how he wouldn’t fill people’s prescriptions and told them to “Get F*cking Vaccinated”. So professional.
The pharmacist who refused to fill prescriptions for unvaccinated people shouldn’t work there either.
As for the legal trouble of filling prescriptions for opioids, that’s an issue that needs to be better defined in the legal system. Putting pharmacists in the position of having to refuse to fill the prescriptions of a doctor so that they won’t be targets of law enforcement is an unfair practice. It’s rather like punishing a store clerk because a 16-year old with a beard and mustache (like my nephew had at 16 which, combined with his height, made him look like an adult) used a believable fake id to buy cigarettes.
In North Carolina, a bar owner lost his bar because a college student used a fake-id made on the Durham DMV’s equipment. That’s right, the Durham DMV was making fake ID’s on the state driver’s license equipment for college students. How is a bar owner supposed to know THAT is fake?
Why could not the bar owner plead qualified immunity?
It also has the side effect of making it more difficult to obtain painkillers.
Some patients experiencing pain from chronic diseases or surgical recovery may turn to black market sources for their painkillers.
Let’s go with a hypothetical.
Pharmacist is asked to fill a prescription but notices the new medication will interact with something else the patient is taking. Most likely with lethal effects. The pharmacist then refuses to fill the prescription. Can he be sued for that?
– What if the patient intentionally misled the prescribing doctor to commit suicide?
– What if the patient has honestly stopped taking the old conflicting medication?
– What if the doctor intentionally wanted to harm the patient?
If we want the pharmacist to act properly in this case you can’t take away their agency in the first one.
Why? Pharmacists are required to be alert for things like drug interactions, and to alert customers when there are risks involved with any medication. I’ve had them warn me to eat when taking extra-strength Tylenol. None of those situations have anything to do with a pharmacist applying a non-professional opinion to a customer’s legitimate medical needs. So:
Pharmacist is asked to fill a prescription but notices the new medication will interact with something else the patient is taking. Most likely with lethal effects. The pharmacist then refuses to fill the prescription. Can he be sued for that?
If he did NOT take appropriate action, he could (and should) be held liable.
– What if the patient intentionally misled the prescribing doctor to commit suicide?
Then the pharmacist has neither legal nor ethical responsibility.If a reasonable pharmacist would have notices suspicious conduct by the would-be suicide, maybe liability could be claimed, but probably unsuccessfully.
– What if the patient has honestly stopped taking the old conflicting medication?
So?
– What if the doctor intentionally wanted to harm the patient?
Not the pharmacist’s problem, unless the pharmacist should know that the prescription is harmful.