Plan B pill shouldn’t be a hassle to purchase
January 23, 2007
The woman was sympathetic, but puzzled. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” she said, “but why would you want everybody to know your business?”
Tashina Byrd has a simple answer for people who wonder why she’s telling the world about her recent contraceptive emergency. (For those who need to know, the condom broke.)
Extras
“It isn’t just my business,” she says. “This is a lot bigger than me.”
The 23-year-old Springfield woman and her boyfriend, Brian O’Neill of Columbus, thought they were simply walking up to the pharmacy window at the Bechtle Avenue Wal-Mart in Springfield to purchase the over-the-counter emergency contraceptive, Plan B.
They had no idea they were about to walk into a national news story — one that does, indeed, raise a much larger question: Should a woman’s ability to obtain birth control be subject to the moral beliefs of the pharmacist behind the counter?
The pharmacist could have used the same rationale to decline to fill Byrd’s birth-control prescription. Plan B isn’t the abortion-pill RU 486, which must be dispensed from a doctor’s office. It doesn’t end a pregnancy; it prevents a pregnancy from taking place. “It’s the same ingredient as a birth-control pill, only a nuclear dose,” O’Neill notes.
The couple watched as the young pharmacy assistant brought the drug to the pharmacist on duty, Brent Beams. “I could see the pharmacist, and he smiled and he laughed and he shook his head,” Byrd says.
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The pharmacy assistant told her, “We have it on hand, but we can’t give it to you.”
Byrd felt hurt and humiliated — and, as she left the store, increasingly angry. Not every woman would have the opportunity, or the courage, to move on to the next drug store. (She bought Plan B at the Springfield CVS a short time later.) “What would happen to a woman who lived in a remote area with the nearest drugstore another 60 miles away?” she asks. “What if it were some scared 18-year-old who doesn’t have a car?”
The Ohio Pharmacists Association offers little in the way of reassuring answers. Executive director Ernie Boyd said the national organization hasn’t previously encountered this kind of controversy involving a nonprescription drug. “Currently our policy is that if a pharmacist has a conscientious objection, the customer should find another pharmacist or another pharmacy,” Boyd said.
But why should a woman have to put up with that? What’s next — can a pharmacist refuse to fill a prescription for AZT because he believes AIDS is a punishment from God? Can he refuse to fill a prescription for Viagra because it promotes male promiscuity?
OK, that last one was a little joke, because we all know that ain’t gonna happen. And I can just imagine how quickly the American Pharmacists Association would be drafting a new policy if it did.
They need to get a clue, and initiate a policy that will protect women from this kind of discrimination when a pharmacist doesn’t feel like doing his job.
Because Tashina Byrd is right: This isn’t just her business.
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