From the Kansas City Star this morning:
http://www.kansascity.com/...
After years of imposing restrictions on abortion, Missouri lawmakers are now taking aim at emergency contraception, commonly known as the morning-after pill.
Legislation presented to a House panel last week would classify emergency contraception as an abortion-inducing medication, contrary to the definition used by the Food and Drug Administration.
The bill also would protect pharmacies from lawsuits and from punishment by state regulators for refusing to sell or fill a prescription for any drug defined as triggering an abortion. Supporters said it would remove any financial incentive to sue the pharmacy’s owners for refusing to sell or stock an item that violated their conscience.
We keep seeing these moves by legislators to protect pharmacists from having to do their jobs. My question is: why? Why are pharmacists singled out as the profession where a person's religious beliefs take precedence over their duty to the public at large? Where one person's beliefs can trump the medical needs of another?
As usual, the bill, House Bill 1625, is aimed at both RU-486 (mifepristone), and the high-dose pill known as Plan B. And the rationale being used is the same. From Susan Klein, a lobbyist for Missouri Right to Life
http://www.missourilife.org
Susan Klein, a lobbyist for Missouri Right to Life, noted that the bill does not attempt to make emergency contraception illegal. It only seeks to prevent family planning activists from exerting legal pressure against pharmacies that refuse to dispense it.
Klein said her group considers emergency contraception a form of abortion because her members believe that pregnancy begins the moment an egg is fertilized. Plan B, therefore, can lead to the death of "an already-created human being" by blocking implantation in the uterus, she said.
By the time of implantation, "the human is long past the stage of being a so-called fertilized egg," Klein said in written testimony. "If denied the ability to implant, then the human cannot form a placenta and continue to live. This means that a drug that prevents implantation causes an abortion."
As noted in the first blockquote, this interpretation of how Plan B works is contrary to the definition used by the FDA, but is the intrepretation most often used by the various right-to-life groups to justify their position. I don't know at this time whether any of the board members of Missouri Right to Life are medical personnel or not, and I intend to check on this as soon as possible, but it has been standard for right-to-life groups to use non-medical intrepretations of pregnancy to advance this cause.
So, what can we do? Fortunately, at this point, this bill has apparently at this point just come up for consideration by a Missouri House panel. I urge all Missouri residents concerned about this issue to contact you state representative to let your feelings be known. Here is a link to find your rep if you are not sure who it is:
http://www.senate.mo.gov/...
Let's stop this travesty before it gets rolling.