Planned Parenthood: Nampa pharmacy broke conscience law | Idaho | Idaho Statesman
BOISE, Idaho — A nurse practitioner at a Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest office in Idaho has filed a complaint with the state pharmacy board, contending a pharmacist abused a new health care conscience law to deny a patient medication.
Lawmakers during the 2010 Legislature passed a measure to allow health-care workers to opt out of providing assistance for abortions, emergency contraception or end-of-life care in some instances, if it violated their conscience.
In the complaint made public Wednesday, the nurse practitioner contends a Walgreens pharmacist in Nampa, Idaho, in November balked at filling a prescription for a drug that helps control bleeding after childbirth or abortions, then hung up the phone when asked for a reference for a pharmacist who would fill the prescription.
Last year's law defines "health care services" that could trigger conscience provisions as "an abortion, dispensation of an abortifacient drug, human embryonic stem cell research, treatment regimens utilizing human embryonic stem cells, human embryo cloning or end of life treatment and care."
The nurse practitioner, who wasn't identified, contends the drug in question - methergine - fits none of those categories.
"Methergine is not an abortifacient and it serves multiple purposes in postpartum care," the practitioner wrote in her complaint. "I believe the pharmacist wrongly applied the conscience protections... Not filling the prescription could have placed my patient in grave danger."
The patient eventually received the prescription from another pharmacy.
In her complaint, the nurse practitioner also raised concerns that the pharmacist inappropriately sought privileged information about the patient for whom the prescription was intended, by inquiring whether the drug would be dispensed to a woman who had aborted her fetus.
Jan Atkinson, a compliance officer at the Idaho Board of Pharmacy, said Wednesday her office received the complaint Nov. 17.
"Based on the letter, we're investigating the complaint," Atkinson said.
A Walgreens spokesman didn't immediately return an e-mail message seeking comment.
In 2010, the conscience bill passed after emotional debate in which its sponsor Sen. Chuck Winder, R-Boise, said it would shield pharmacists and other health-care workers from being forced to provide care they found morally objectionable.
Meanwhile, foes said it could block the access of women, especially in rural areas, to lifesaving medical care or emergency-contraception drugs when they need them the most.
"Pharmacists are taking it one step further. When will it stop? What drugs will they not prescribe next?" said Kristen Glundberg-Prossor, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest in Seattle, on Wednesday. "People have a right to get their medications that their doctors prescribe to them."
According to Idaho's new law, pharmacists who invoke a conscience right are required to provide services until a willing alternative caregiver is found, in instances when there's a life-threatening situation and no other care is available.
It's probably not the first instance, it surely won't be the last, but it's the beginning of the inevitable rise of problems from creating this particular 'conscience-based' law. A patient's care ought to be a patient's choice. It ought not be an issue for a medical practitioner at any level to express a conscientious objection and to refuse treatment in non-life-threatening situations, and if the patient finds it to be a problem there ought to be other professionals available with whom the patient is more comfortable and from whom they can receive care they find appropriate. Anyone who wouldn't find saving a life to be more important than any moral objections to what they might have to do in the process shouldn't be in the medical field (or probably in society), so there shouldn't have to be legislation requiring that life-saving care be given. Unfortunately, under the current (highly dysfunctional) American system choices of doctors and care are limited for most by economic status and bureaucracy, so people turn to the law to try to force their practitioners to please them and that will never work. Laws cannot make people obey them, especially in a system that rarely sees justice fulfilled. They can only make criminals of those who get caught engaging in behavior lawmakers find undesirable, and as soon as the law starts being used to define a moral code rather than a social contract it becomes ineffective as a tool for justice.
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