Reply #17: performing vs withholding

[Mandate My Ass]

What about doctors and abortions? As noted above doctors do not have to perform abortions. And I've never heard of one who held a position in an abortion clinic who refused to do so. A doctor's practice can be as limited in scope as s/he wants. A pharmacist's must not.

Nurses ordered to give lethal injections? Lethal injections are done by volunteers, and there is no shortage of volunteers that would compel anybody to order a nurse to provide a lethal injection.

By virtue of being in a profession, do we have to do as told in every circumstance? If you even suspect that your job might entail performing an act that goes against your conscience or ethics, but is a condition of employment, don't take the job!

Pharmacists are not performing, they are denying a perfectly legal, legitimate medical service that they find personaally objectionable without taking into account the life-altering consequences that withholding that prescription entails. They knew when they took the job what it meant.

And I might add, it seems odd to me that someone in a medical field rewrites the definition of conception. A woman has not conceived until the egg implants itself on the uterine wall. They pretend it begins with fertilization. The "life begins at fertilization" fallacy is a religious belief, it is not medical science. So they are wrong technically, as well as ethically, if they refuse to dispense something that is birth control.