Can pharmacists have a conscience? Activists are demanding that Congress and state legislatures pass laws forcing pharmacists and other health workers to act against their own conscience in such matters as abortion, morning-after pills, and gay parenting. Some doctors say it violates their conscience to perform abortions or provide artificial insemination for unmarried or gay people. Some pharmacists believe that the morning-after pill is a form of abortion, and their religious commitment forbids them to dispense it. And now some patients and activists are demanding laws to force health professionals to dispense the care the patients want, no matter how it violates the health worker's conscience. Activists who march for a woman's right to choose want the government to overrule a pharmacist's right to choose. I was reminded of Arnold Kling's question "Is Bioethics an Oxymoron?" when I read in the Washington Post the comments of official bioethicist R. Alta Charo: "As soon as you become a licensed professional, you take on certain obligations to act like a professional, which means your patients come first." As I wrote in an online debate for Legal Affairs magazine,
this is an example of how one state intervention generates the demand for additional interventions. We say you can't be a pharmacist unless you get a state license, and now you want to say that that license should empower the state to impose morally offensive obligations on those who were required to get the license. Similarly, we require a prescription to get many drugs, including some forms of contraception. Why should a woman need a prescription for contraception? Why not just grant access to contraception by allowing it to be sold over the counter? Here we've created one intervention—the requirement that people get a prescription from a licensed doctor, which they must take to a licensed pharmacist—and it has led to a situation you don't like, in which some tiny number of pharmacists are refusing to dispense a particular prescription. So you say we should have another rule, another regulation, another intervention.
As philosopher Loren Lomasky of the University of Virginia puts it in the Post article, "Freedom of conscience has been central to our political notions since even before the United States existed. People should not be forced into doing things that they find morally odious." Do the people who want doctors and pharmacists to be forced to provide abortions and morning-after pills want anesthesiologists to be forced to participate in executions? I'd bet not. These activists want their moral values enforced by law, they don't want a neutral rule that all doctors must obey the laws of the state. If they did take such a consistent position, of course, I'd still disagree: anesthesiologists shouldn't be forced to participate in what they may regard as murder, any more than gynecologists should. This seems like such a clear issue to me. Yet most of the people in the Post's online chat about the issue were insistent that health workers must be forced to do as they're told, regardless of their own conscience. Whatever happened to the liberal claims of individual autonomy, of the right of conscience, of the individual exercising his or her own mind? Gone with the wind, it seems, when liberals have the power to impose their values on other people's consciences. In a country of 290 million people and 14 million businesses, we should let these issues sort themselves out in the marketplace. Chances are that major drugstore chains like CVS and Walgreen's are going to insist that their stores fill all prescriptions. If they have more than one pharmacist on duty at a time, then they may be willing to tolerate pharmacists who avoid filling certain prescriptions. If they do insist that all pharmacists be prepared to fill any prescription presented by a customer, then pharmacists who can't accept such rules will have to look for jobs elsewhere. And if customers encounter a pharmacy that won't give them what they want, then they will have to find another pharmacy. A prime reason for freedom is pluralism. In the modern world we don't all share the same moral and religious perspectives. The fact of moral diversity is a good reason for toleration and allowing people to sort themselves out in society according to their own moral choices. Freedom in a pluralistic society should mean that individuals get to make their own choices. Sometimes other people aren't willing to do what we want them to do. But frankly, it's involuntary servitude to force other people to work for us when they prefer not to. And it's appalling that 141 years after the Thirteenth Amendment, some people still want to hold others to involuntary servitude.