Angered by a University Health Services advertisement regarding birth control, State Rep. Daniel LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, authored a bill last month that would prevent the UW System from prescribing, dispensing or even advising students about the availability of hormonal birth control. According to LeMahieu, Wisconsin taxpayers have no obligation to support the “promiscuity” that is a natural consequence of the availability of birth control.
Wisconsin is also one of many states that are currently considering an “opt-out” clause for pharmacists who do not wish to fill prescriptions for birth control because it runs counter to their religious beliefs. The surprisingly honestly named Patient Abandonment Bill would not only allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception, but also to withhold information about such services, as well as fertility treatments and even pregnancy tests. Not a single health-care organization in the state has gone on record in support of the bill.
LeMahieu’s bill has yet to be signed into law and was recently condemned in an advisory opinion by Attorney General Peggy Lautenschlager as unconstitutional. While her opinion does not carry the force of law, it did highlight an overlooked aspect of the bill — its discriminatory attitude toward women. In condemning “promiscuity,” LeMahieu made no mention of condom distribution or male sexuality at all: the bill is targeted directly at depriving women — and only women — of vital health-care services.
The Patient Abandonment Bill is clearly intended to do the same; furthermore, it rests on an outright misconception that contraception is equivalent to abortion. In reality, neither birth control nor emergency contraception are abortifacients — drugs that prevent implanantation of a fertilized egg. Regularly taken birth control prevents ovulation, so that fertilization never even occurs; taken immediately after intercourse, emergency contraception does the same. (It is another misconception, evidently held by the authors of the bill that fertilization invariably occurs immediately at the end of intercourse.) Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin estimates that 25,000 pregnancies occur nationwide every year as a result of rape, two-thirds of which end in abortion; with immediate access to emergency contraception (as opposed to a lecture and a refusal), most of those pregnancies could be prevented, rendering abortion unnecessary.
Both bills will hopefully be defeated in due course, by a gubernatorial veto if necessary. LeMahieu will join the long list of men who are incapable of getting pregnant yet seek to deny women that freedom, and Wisconsin women will not be denied health-care services on the basis of their gender. Other states are considering legislation to require pharmacists to provide access to drugs to prescription holders; Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has proposed similar legislation at the national level. However, some religious organizations are arguing that pharmacists should not be compelled to fill prescriptions (or even refer holders to different pharmacies) if they have a moral objection.
It is a growing national trend for religious conservatives to argue that nothing less than positive government action on their behalf constitutes discrimination against religious (read: Christian) citizens. This claim is rather dubious, given that America is overwhelmingly religious and Christians of all denominations constitute a large demographic majority. Nevertheless, the argument is increasingly heard that if the government is not sensitive to religious beliefs by actively recognizing them, it is engaged in irreligious discrimination (rather than merely being neutral with respect to religion).
Most of the rights enumerated by the Constitution and defined by decades (and in some cases, centuries) of Supreme Court jurisprudence are negative prohibitions on government action (the Bill of Rights begins with, after all, “Congress shall make no law …”). The right that objecting pharmacists are asking for, though, is a right to ask the government to positively intervene and allow them to break the supply chain of drugs and health services, and to allow them to violate their own code of ethics by usurping the judgment of doctors issuing prescriptions.
As Dahlia Lithwick aptly put it recently in the magazine Slate, a pharmaceutical opt-out right is a “theocratic heckler’s veto.” Objecting pharmacists are asking to be excused from the social contract for no better reason than because they feel like it. Meanwhile, preventable pregnancies go up, and women are denied access to essential health-care services. The last time anyone checked, it was not illegal for women (or men) to enjoy nonprocreative consensual sex. Religious doctrine might say otherwise, but in a pluralistic democracy no one religion can define the scope of acceptable behavior for all citizens. If religiously conservative pharmacists don’t want to dispense birth control or emergency contraception, they can do it the old-fashioned way: convince a majority of the electorate that such drugs should be outlawed. Having failed to do so, they are instead asking that the laws not be applied to them, simply because that suits them better.
Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and philosophy.
