CHICAGO, June 21, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The American Medical Association is backing a proposal that would force pharmacists to dispense abortifacients like the morning-after emergency abortion and birth control pill or refer to another pharmacist to have the prescriptions filled.
A resolution passed Monday by the AMA’s House of Delegates states that pharmacists who oppose abortifacients on moral grounds should provide an “immediate referral to an appropriate alternative dispensing pharmacy without interference,” according to a Chicago Tribune report.
“Our position is on behalf of the patient,” claimed AMA board member Dr. Peter Carmel. “The AMA strongly believes patients have to have access to their medications. It's the obligation on behalf of the pharmacist ... to tell them where to go.”
The Pharmacists for Life International (PFLI) web site describes their view of the morning-after emergency abortifacient: “Any medically educated person should be given to understand that this regimen works primarily by preventing the implantation of an already fertilized egg. This is not contraception.”
“A pharmacist by virtue of properly understood conscience cannot be licitly compelled to cooperate in such a fashion with what he knows will result in a chemical abortion and, hence, a dead baby,” the PFLI statement emphasizes. “Such activity is called material cooperation. Further, it is not an inconvenience to refuse to refer such a client since the pharmacist is doing the woman and her preborn child a favor in terms of physical and spiritual health.”
“Material cooperation with such an evil can never be licit even if it may be lawful, as it is in today's society,” the statement from the pharmacist’s group continues. “In fact, pharmacists aware of the evil nature of such a scenario would have a duty as a pharmacist and a person not to cooperate in such an evil even under pain of serious adverse ramifications.”
“Some authors, hiding their publicly stated support for any and all baby killing, have erroneously stated shameful opinions which equivocate on the rights of conscience and thus claim a pharmacist may have a right of conscience, but if all else fails, he must cooperate with the evil in our example,” the PFLI web site states, referring to efforts by groups such as the AMA to mandate that pharmacists who will not dispense the abortifacients at least refer a client to someone who will. “Such thinking shows the irrational absurdity and confusion in the minds of those who adhere to such ideas.”
“Pharmacists are under no obligation, even if written in the positive law, to violate the Divine Law,” the PFLI statement concludes. “This would include, but not be limited to any mandate to dispense or counsel for contraception, abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
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