Abortion militants coerce Catholics to betray beliefs !!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: The Enquirer
December 10, 2005 Author: Kevin Fogarty



There is a line between (a) demanding that others let you do something they think is abominable and (b) forcing them to participate in it. Abortion advocates today are crossing that line, with no telling where they will stop.

Earlier this year, an Illinois pharmacist refused to fill prescriptions for so-called "morning-after pills," believing that it would mean participating in a kind of abortion. The abortion lobby got busy, and Illinois' governor ordered that pharmacists in the state supply "emergency contraceptives" to customers without delay.

"Emergency contraceptives," a transparently polemical expression, means morning-after pills. There is, of course, no emergency other than pregnancy itself; and if that's an emergency, then every abortion is also an "emergency" abortion.

The governor's order was a political intervention, not a matter of traditional professional ethics - the morning-after pill is a relatively new thing, after all - and it wrecked the state pharmacists association's attempt to develop procedures allowing dissenting pharmacists to "step away" from these situations while minimizing inconvenience to customers. The order also may have violated several state and federal provisions on freedom of conscience.

Indeed, it amounts to a kind of "Catholic Exclusion Act," since under it a Catholic pharmacist could not follow church teachings without being expelled from the profession. Citing the order, Walgreen Co. recently began suspending dissenting pharmacists without pay.

There are few documented cases of customers actually being unable to find pharmacists to fill their orders. The comparative harms in this situation are wildly disproportionate: Choose between your deepest beliefs and your livelihood vs. drive another block down the street (or, at worst, plan your sex life more carefully). This is a shameful, almost sadistic exercise of political muscle by the abortion lobby.

It would be odd and outrageous if a country that long allowed for conscientious objection to military service, even where the country's survival was at stake, couldn't allow it here, where only a trip to the next drugstore is at stake.

And rest assured, the "conscience legislation" passed after Roe v. Wade to guarantee that objecting doctors and hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions will be the next target, once we let abortion militants establish that no one's conscience matters but theirs.

[Ed. Kevin Fogarty is a Cincinnati-based international consultant on financial and corporate law reform.}