Pharmacists need to do their jobs
No person should ever enter a pharmacy and worry that a pharmacist will decide not to fill a prescription for medicine deemed necessary by a doctor.
Yet a woman in Arizona, suffering through the anticipated loss of a muchwanted baby, had to face the judgment of a Walgreens pharmacist.
He declined to fill a prescription for misoprostol to terminate her failed pregnancy. His response took place in front of the woman’s 7-year-old child, within the hearing of other customers.
In addition to mourning her baby, the woman, Nicole Arteaga, faced public humiliation. This is wrong. Arteaga has filed a complaint with the Arizona State Board of Pharmacy, which will investigate the case and hear it before the board’s next meeting in August.
It’s important for the board to examine what happened and attempt to prevent it from occurring to any other women.
Walgreens should reconsider its policies as well. It allows pharmacists to follow their “consciences” — but that puts the needs of patients last. The company chooses its pharmacists.
Walgreens can decide to hire pharmacists who will fill a doctor’s orders and put patients first. Going to the pharmacy should not be a minefield, but that is what it can become for women. In small-town America, particularly, the corner drug store might be the only one in town.
Arizona is one of six states — not including New Mexico, thankfully — with laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to fill emergency contraception, morning-after and even basic birth control prescriptions. In allowing a refusal, Walgreens asks employees to either call another pharmacist to fill the prescription or refer the patient to another location (which this pharmacist did). Eventually, Arteaga had her prescription filled.
That does not lessen her humiliation in front of strangers and her child.
From her account on Facebook: “I stood at the mercy of this pharmacist explaining my situation in front of my 7-year-old, and five customers standing behind only to be denied because of his ethical beliefs. … I left Walgreens in tears, ashamed and feeling humiliated by a man who knows nothing of my struggles but feels it is his right to deny medication prescribed to me by my doctor.”
The trouble with an uninformed pharmacist stepping in between a patient and doctor is that he does not know the patient’s circumstances. Arteaga’s baby had stopped developing. Her doctor told Arteaga she could take a prescription or undergo a medical procedure. She chose the prescription, only to face a pharmacist who sent her away in tears.
“I get it we all have our beliefs,” she wrote. “But what he failed to understand is this isn’t the situation I had hoped for, this isn’t something I wanted. This is something I have zero control over. He has no idea what it’s like to want nothing more than to carry a child to full term and be unable to do so.”
Arteaga, in choosing to go public, is doing women everywhere a service. She wrote, “I share this story because I wish no other women have to go through something like this at time when [they] are vulnerable and already suffering. I am in left in disbelief on how this can happen? How is this okay?” Yes, how is this OK? The answer is simple: It might have been legal or allowed by policy, but it is never OK.
Change the law. Change the policy. That way, no woman will be shamed at the prescription counter.