Health and Reproductive Justice
Health Care Refusals
Refusal to Provide Health Care Based on Personal Beliefs Harms Women
Throughout the country, legislatures have granted health care providers sweeping rights to refuse to help people because of the health care providers' personal beliefs. While federal laws have long exempted health care providers from having to provide abortions in most circumstances, the last several years have seen an unprecedented effort to expand the ability of health care providers to refuse to treat, refer, or inform patients about any and all health care needs. For example, Idaho, unfortunately, passed a law in 2010 which emboldens health care providers to refuse to help patients. Read our letter opposing Idaho’s law.
Health care refusals hurt all patients, but they fall most heavily on women, the LGBT community, and people needing end of life care. Women suffer denials of abortion care, contraception, and other reproductive health services; lesbian, gay, and transgender individuals have been denied all manner of medical care because of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity. All are at risk that a health care provider or institution’s religious belief will trump the patient’s wishes for end-of-life care. These denials often come with refusals to refer patients to helpful providers, refusals to provide medically accurate information about a patient's options, and providers have lectured or insulted patients for their health care needs.
Legal Voice has worked hard to defend patients’ access to health care, particularly at the pharmacy. Our involvement in the issue started back in 2005, when women across the United States found themselves turned away from their local drugstores when presenting their pharmacists with prescriptions for birth control pills, especially emergency contraception, also known as the morning-after pill. It's not just birth control, however: pregnant women have been refused drugs they need simply because they were pregnant; women have been refused misoprostol, a drug used in many gynecological procedures; other patients have been refused antibiotics and insulin needles. Legal Voice believes that patients' rights to health care can be balanced with the individual beliefs of pharmacists or other health care providers, by laws and policies that require the pharmacy to make sure a patient gets his or her lawfully prescribed medication without discrimination and in a timely manner.
That's why we're fighting to defend Washington rules requiring pharmacies to fill patients' prescriptions. That's why we urged the Oregon Board of Pharmacy to change its policy allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill any prescription. And that's why we need your help. If you've been refused at the pharmacy counter, we'd like to hear about it — please contact us.
Legal Voice Defends Washington Regulations Requiring Pharmacies to Fill Your Prescriptions
On April 12, 2007, after two years of advocacy by Legal Voice and other groups and citizens throughout the state, the Washington State Pharmacy Board adopted rules requiring pharmacies to ensure that patients get their prescriptions filled on site and in a timely manner. The rules require pharmacies to dispense all lawfully prescribed drugs and devices, including over-the-counter drugs like Plan B (emergency contraception) and clarify that a pharmacist's personal and/or moral judgments have no place at the pharmacy counter. These rules are critical to ensuring that women – and all people in Washington State – can get their needed prescriptions for birth control, HIV/AIDS medications, insulin needles, and all other medications in a timely manner.
Soon after the rules went into effect, two individual pharmacists and a pharmacy owner challenged these rules in court. Legal Voice joined the lawsuit, Stormans, et al., v. Selecky, et al., as co-counsel for seven individuals who intervened in the suit to protect their, and others', rights to timely access to medication. In November 2007, a federal judge in Tacoma issued a preliminary injunction temporarily suspending the rules with respect to emergency contraception only – thus treating women's reproductive health differently from (and worse than) all other health issues. We appealed this decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals –and won. Read the Court’s opinion.
But, although the rules are now in effect, the case is not over. On the eve of trial, the Board of Pharmacy decided to reverse course, and proposed new rules that would allow pharmacies to refuse and refer patients. Legal Voice and a broad coalition of community and advocacy groups knows as the Health Care Access Coalitation spent several months working to convince the Board of Pharmacy to keep the current rules. Ultimately, we succeeded in convincing the Board to keep the rules in place.
Trial in Stormans v. Selecky will take place sometime in 2011, and Legal Voice and its allies will continue to defend the rules. patients needs must come first, and these rules represnt the best possible balance between an individual pharmacists's personal beliefs and the health of patients.
Women's rights. Nothing less.
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