Pharmacists Refusing to Fill Prescriptions for Birth Control on Religious Grounds

Lately a number of states have passed laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or the morning after pill or other medications based on their “religious beliefs”. Other states like Illinois are passing laws that they cannot refuse. A number of conservatives are complaining that this violates their Constitutional Right of Freedom of Religion. Let’s follow this logic. Let’s say that your spouse is suffering from advanced cancer and needs a certain medication to stop the cancer. Your local pharmacist believes that it is the will of God that your spouse has cancer and to stop the advance of the cancer using medicines would be to thwart the will of God. Therefore he refuses to fill the prescription on religious grounds. Now you may say, “That’s different. Cancer is not the same thing as birth control—it’s OK for a pharmacist to be against birth control or the morning after pill, but not against fighting cancer.” But who is to decide which religious beliefs are OK and which are not? You? Me? The President? Is he going to make a judgment on every pharmacist in the country on whether their refusal is OK or not? Should we create a Governmental Office charged with the responsibility to make that decision and call the pharmacies letting them know if their “religious beliefs” are OK or not? Why not leave it up to the doctor to decide which medicines are appropriate, and leave it up to the consumer to decide which over the counter medicines he or she wants to buy rather than making pharmacists the moral gatekeepers of which medicines people should be allowed to get or not get based on their “religious beliefs”! If a pharmacist doesn’t like dispensing certain medicines because of personal beliefs, maybe he should quit and find a job that doesn’t require him to fill doctors’ prescriptions!