Religious refusal laws affecting emergency contraception access

In 2005, the Arizona Daily Star reported that a 20-year-old woman living in Tucson Arizona was raped. The woman spent three frantic days calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception. She finally found a pharmacy carrying the prescription, but she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it due to religious and moral objections. By the time a willing pharmacist was found, the optimal time frame for taking the medication had passed.

Pharmacists around the country are allowed to deny rape victims emergency contraception if doing so violates their religious beliefs.  The trauma of rape should not be compounded by denying access to emergency contraception, but there are no federal laws that address whether or not a pharmacist may refuse to fill a prescription. 

• Each year, approximately 25,000 women in the United States become pregnant as a result of sexual assault
• Timely access to emergency contraception could help many of these rape survivors avoid the additional trauma of facing an unintended pregnancy.
• Polls show that nearly 80 percent of American women want their hospitals, whether or not religiously affiliated, to offer emergency contraception to rape survivors.

According to the Guttmacher Institute:

• 4 states have passed laws allowing a pharmacist to refuse to dispense emergency contraception drugs
• 9 states have broad refusal clauses that do not specifically mention pharmacists
• Mississippi explicitly allows pharmacies to refuse to dispense contraceptives, including emergency contraception.

Reports of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, including emergency contraceptives, have surfaced in States across the Nation, including Alabama, Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Since emergency contraception became available without a prescription for women over the age of seventeen, refusals to provide non-prescription emergency contraception have also been reported.

Pharmacists are employed in the field of medicine, not spirituality. They have the right to consider their own religious beliefs in determining what medical decisions they make for their own care, but their personal religion should never determine the care they give their customers and patients.

The Secular Coalition for America supports the Access to Birth Control Act that would require prescriptions be filled without delay; if a pharmacist has a personal objection to filling a legal prescription, the law should require that it be filled immediately by another pharmacist. Further, we support the Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act mandating that hospitals guarantee rape victims access to emergency contraception, regardless of the religious beliefs of individual doctors or other medical professionals.