Yesterday, a new pharmacy that will not sell birth control opened in a Virginia strip mall. Divine Mercy Care may sound like a place one goes to die, but it's the seventh pharmacy certified by the group "Pharmacists for Life" and encouraged by HHS's new "conscience" rule. Now, if you're a pharmacist who finds birth control immoral, you don't have to waste time refusing to fill customers' prescriptions and sitting through pesky court trials. Instead, you can set up your own pharmacy where only like-minded people shop. If a woman desperately begs you to fill her prescription for contraception, or a rape victim requests a morning after pill, you can just say no, or better yet, explain that their imminent pregnancies are part of God's beautiful plan.

At first, I thought maybe this wasn't such a bad idea. After all, the customer knows what she's getting into up-front. Women can spare themselves the humiliation of being denied a prescription. If they need the morning after pill, they won't waste time being turned down and frantically searching for a pharmacy within the brief time period that Plan B remains effective. Best to keep real pharmacies and "faith-filled" pharmacies separate—Leslie Unruh can shop at her local Divine Mercy Care, and everyone else can just go to Rite Aide. And maybe it's in everybody's best interest not to have a medical professional perform a task they disagree with. Doctors who oppose abortions are not required to perform them, and it seems fairly reasonable that this serves the good of the patient, as well.

But here's the problem, or rather, multiple problems. First of all, Divine Mercy Care is not so up-front. On a section on their website called, "What Sets Us Apart," the fact that they do not sell contraception is tenth on a bulleted list. What really sets them apart, according to the first few bulleted items, is that they are "family friendly" (as opposed to all others which are, what, family-unfriendly?), "a non-profit pharmacy, meaning [their] prices are fair, low and competitive as [they] strive to serve the insured, underinsured and those without insurance," and "an educational pharmacy, meaning the pharmacist is always available to counsel, teach and explain, and drug literature is available in English and Spanish." Which points to a second problem: the pharmacy is targeting the uninsured and uneducated. These are the people who are least likely to have the knowledge and resources to say, "I know that I need the morning after pill immediately, and that it's within my rights to have access to it. I'm going to drive another 30 miles to find a pharmacy that carries it." These are the women who will come to their nearest pharmacy in an emergency seeking advice, and will be the most vulnerable to a pharmacist who tells them that their only option is to trust in God's design.

The parts of the country that are most pro-life tend to be rural areas far from big cities—the kind of place that would have just one pharmacy. As NARAL's Virginia chapter's executive director Tarina Keene commented in the AP article on DMC, "If this emboldens pharmacies in other parts of the state, it could really affect low-income and rural women in terms of access." So this is not a matter of women choosing between running an errand at their local Divine Mercy Care or neighborhood Duane Reade. This could become a choice between Divine Mercy Care or no care at all. If one pharmacy can be anti-contraception, all pharmacies can become anti-contraception, and in certain regions, if they can, they will. This is a situation where the federal government needs to step in and require all pharmacies to provide contraception. Instead, they've done the exact opposite.

Thank you to Hannah for help researching this piece.