Wallgreens: Two Strikes, and You're Out

Many people want children.  And that's great.  No one wants as many children as they could possibly have.  And that's fine.  It makes a lot of sense.  There aren't families where the adult female is "barefoot and pregnant" most of the time, and the families have 20 or more children.  Pregnancy is either easy or it's almost impossible.  People strategize as to how to be intimate, which more or less everyone wants, and not have a pregnancy result from the intimacy.  Most of the strategizing involves how to avoid pregnancy.  Some of it involves how to...undo a pregnancy that resulted when no one wanted it.  I have a little more insight into the (personal) religious reasons why someone would object to undoing a pregnancy than I have into the political reasons someone would object, unless they're actually the same reasons.  But then, we're stuck with the problem of why someone would want to live in a country that Constitutionally guarantees "separation of church and state," when they actually don't want church and state to be separate.  I wonder how that conversation would go.

A year or more ago, Walgreens got into the news because some pregnant woman, whose fetus had died in utero, presented a prescription (presumably from an obstetrician/gynecologist), and the medication prescribed would have expelled the dead fetus.  The pharmacist on duty queried the woman as to whether or not she was pregnant -- technically, she was -- and based on his personal religious beliefs, he refused to fill the prescription, because it would have cause what he decided to interpret as an abortion.  (Duh.  That was the whole point.  And an abortion of what?)  The articles I read at the time were unclear as to how this was resolved -- whether some other pharmacist on duty at that Walgreens filled the prescription, on the basis of not having the same and equally rigid and mindless religious beliefs, whether the woman went to a different Walgreens, whether she went to another drug store, or what.

Now, Walgreens is in the news again -- and the focus of a number of petitions I'm asked to sign -- for refusing to dispense mifepristone, colloquially known as the "abortion pill" -- in states in which Walgreens fears it would be sued for dispensing this medication, likewise presumably prescribed by an OB/GYN doctor.  (But they'll dispense it in states in which they don't have reason to think they'll be sued.)

But here's the thing about Walgreens.  It has chosen to be a large chain of drug stores.  It sells other products, too, but it's mainly a drug store.  It's job as a drug store is to dispense drugs prescribed by doctors.  Walgreens is not a religion, and it's not a political party.  It's not a shoe store, or a chain of electrical contractors.  It could be any of those, but it has chosen to be a drug store.  "It doesn't take a rocket scientist," as they say, to conclude what Walgreens should do with a prescription issued by a doctor.

There was a time when Alcoholics Anonymous militantly urged its members not only not to drink alcohol, or abuse other substances, but not to take medications prescribed by a psychiatrist.  They viewed those medications as intending to change how patients felt.  And if you're going to take something to change how you feel, then it's not a far cry, according to AA, to drinking, or shooting heroin.  (AA has abandoned that ill-conceived crusade.)  And I wouldn't rule out the possibility that some Walgreens employees, or even pharmacists, had been active alcoholics, and were perhaps even still AA members.  But they would have no business refusing to fill prescriptions written by psychiatrists, because they themselves might not have wanted to take these medications, for AA's then "reasoning."

I had reduced my patronage of Walgreens over the matter of the woman carrying the dead fetus.  I'm completely done with them now.  I saw an article as recently as yesterday indicating that Walgreens is already feeling the results of its cowardice, and perhaps rethinking its role and purpose in society and American commerce and "health care."  It's unclear to me today if I would ever again buy anything from Walgreens.  But we'll see how this further evolves, if it does.