PHARMACIST REFUSALS
Refusals to fill prescriptions for birth control or to sell over-the-counter contraceptives are a growing problem across the country.
- Federal and state laws have often sided with pharmacists who are unwilling to provide women their prescription contraception, enacting “conscience clauses” to allow it.
- Employers, hospitals and managed care plans can and do refuse to cover contraceptives.
- Only 14 states either require that physicians fill all prescriptions or require a refusing pharmacist to provide a referral to one who is willing. The rest do not.
- New proposed federal regulations would expand health care providers’ ability to refuse to provide virtually any service or product for ideological reasons.
These refusals put extremists’ ideology ahead of women’s health needs.
- The refusals involve personal opinion and religious belief, not medical or professional concerns.
- Women in rural regions and those with low incomes often cannot go to another pharmacy to fill their prescriptions without hardship. Such delay may jeopardize their health.
The Food and Drug Administration announced in August 2006 that emergency contraceptives could be made available over-the-counter to women over 18.
- The medication must still be held behind the counter, requiring women to interact with pharmacists or clerks in order to obtain it.
- Women have reported that clerks have erroneously told them only pharmacists may dispense EC, or that only women may purchase it, or that only one packet may be purchased at any one time. All these statements are false.
- Emergency contraception steadily loses effectiveness the longer one waits before taking it. A 72-hour delay ends its ability to prevent pregnancy.
Organizations Protecting Women's Access to Prescriptions:
Organization that Encourages Pharmacists to Refuse to Fill Women's Birth Control Prescriptions
Videos of the Defenders
Videos from the Extreme
Related Information
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