This story, which I was hoping would spark more discussion here than it has so far, would be an excellent starting point for a question in a presidential candidates debate, or indeed any debate regarding the proper status of abortion in the law and our societal ethics. Right now, the negligent killing of two fertilized eggs that a married couple regarded, with considerable justification, as “their babies” is treated with less seriousness than if someone had murdered the family’s puppy. What is a fertilized egg, a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, and a newborn baby? It can’t possibly be that their true nature as human beings (or not) with the right to be protected (or not) under the law is magically altered according to what the mother chooses to believe, or what a legislature decrees…can it?
Here is James Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”:
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Negligent homicide by the staff, and strict financial liability for the corporation, are evident here, in my view. I know this sounds harsh to some, but so is the killing of an unborn child.
Over the past decade, my wife and I caught several errors in prescription fulfillment in our own meager regimes of pharmaceuticals. This happened at three of our previous insurance-preferred pharmacies. It is also reported anecdotally by a number of people I know.
Fortunately for us, we detected the errors before taking any wrongly prescribed drugs, and we learned to double-check everything, every time. (These errors also gave us more motivation to improve our nutrition and fitness in order to escape prescription drugs altogether.)
These incidents led me to the inescapable conclusion that pharmacies -like many other public and private endeavors- are consistently hiring unserious people to perform very serious tasks. Filling prescriptions is not the same as stocking the candy aisle.
I’ll risk sounding like a plaintiff’s attorney here to say that the only way these enterprises usually learn their lesson is when they are sued into awareness.
Ethics Alarms 
There is no question that pharmacies are increasingly error prone. In fact, businesses as a whole are becoming error prone.
I have a few ideas on that.
1) You will find poor employees in every profession. There are bad lawyers, bad actors, bad bus drivers, bad cashiers, bad teachers. I’m not trying to brush off bad pharmacy techs or rationalize it away, only to point out that they are every where.
That being said.
2) Businesses have been short-staffing for a long time. Even before the pandemic, CVS definitely had a hard time filling prescriptions. Business has developed as a standard operating procedure getting the most work out of the fewest people. In the service industry, that means you have overworked employees who don’t make much money and are being dumped on by every customer who barks at them to “tell your boss to hire more people”. They already have.
3) Businesses have also piled on unnecessary workloads on employees. In this case, I do not understand why the pharmacy is set up to check out people buying merchandise. Hire another cashier for the front and let the pharmacy employees do their extremely important jobs.
“Business has developed as a standard operating procedure getting the most work out of the fewest people.”
This isn’t businesses. This is businesses, workers, artisans, homes, animals, life….
All entities seek to optimize outputs vs inputs. The very workers that are ‘overworked’, are doing the exact same thing – putting in the minimum effort they think they can get away with and still get paid.
“consistently hiring unserious people to perform very serious tasks”
As a culture we stopped teaching pride in work and we stopped raising people with the idea that work is a central feature of what you are. We let marxist insurgents undermine our value set. You made your life work? How bourgeois… what a waste of your life! How can you be so materialistic! How unfulfilling to seek pride in what you do!
Welp…now we’re reaping the bounty of a society encouraged to seek out the natural inclination of minimizing effort and seeking maximum payoff. A work ethic and pride in your job isn’t natural – it’s a *moral* value that has to be taught from childhood.
If abortion is legal, then killing an unborn child can’t be serious. There is no way around this if we want to have a reality or logic-based society. If we want to have an emotion-based society, however, we can base it on how the mother feels about the fetus. Is it her child, or is it a ‘clump of cells’? If a person can be a man or a woman, young or old, cat or a squirrel, or even a nonsensical new made-up category, just based on how they feel at the moment, and we HAVE to take that seriously, and we can be held legally responsible for the consequences of not knowing how that person felt at that moment, then yeah, we can have it both ways. This is a logical extension of the sexual harassment laws put in place to protect women. Because the specifics of harassment was subjective, we allowed women to determine the legality of a behavior based on how they felt at the moment, not based on any objective criteria. Then, we did the same thing for sexual assault, making any sexual encounter potential sexual assault.
As for pharmacies and the medical community, I have a couple of examples personally. When my wife was pregnant, we were informed by the OB/GYN that the test results showed that the pregnancy was not viable and it would terminate, 100%. My wife was almost 30, so he advised to have a D&C so we could try again as soon as possible. We refused. He seemed somewhat annoyed because, as he pointed out, we will be visiting him every month for months, just waiting for this pregnancy to terminate in a miscarriage. This happened for several months, with him puzzled as to how the pregnancy was continuing normally, despite test results to the contrary. He was really afraid of a stillbirth or something horrible happening. Well, our son was just fine…OK, he can be really annoying at times, but medically fine. What happened? Well, a few months after our son was born, one of my wife’s friends in the hospital lab told her they had a recall for those tests. They were all giving the wrong results. How many women couldn’t resist the advice of the physician and aborted their perfectly healthy children? The second example was from picking up a prescription for my wife at the pharmacy. She didn’t tell me what it was for. When I looked at the bottle, I called her and asked her if there was something she needed to tell me: the drug was a hormone-based breast cancer treatment. It turns out, it was supposed to be Tylenol 3. When I called the pharmacy about it, they insisted they couldn’t have made that mistake. So, I took it back to them and it resulted in quite a flurry of activity.
My pharmacy mistake story involves an antibiotic that is shelf-stable as a powder, but mixed with water prior to administration.
The tech poured the powder in the tiny bottle then added the water. The powder immediately cemented itself into a hard plug at the bottom of the bottle.
“Oh, just shake it” was the response when called to complain. Had to tie it to a drill bit and run the drill for fifteen minutes.