Following Up... Womb Control redux

Sometimes, I wonder if the nutbar crowd is following my blog just to decide what to do next. (and no, I'm not so full of myself to believe that in any serious way)

However, via The Galloping Beaver, we learn of a slightly less than rational pharmacist refusing to dispense a woman's birth control prescription:

When she went to the pharmacy counter, she received a slip of paper signed by the pharmacy owners (Stuart Anderson, Kurt Depner and Kori Depner) stating that the pharmacy would no longer fill birth control prescriptions.

Adding insult to injury, the note goes onto say that they pharmacy will "continue to serve your prescription needs with utmost care and trust." The customer, who happens to be a 49-year-old woman who is unable to conceive and uses birth control for a medical condition, called the pharmacy and asked one of the owners why the pills were being discontinued. The owner told her that birth control pills are dangerous for women.

Waitasecond here - we've heard plenty about fundamentalists in the States doing this kind of crap before. This is more of the Forced-Birth crowd punishing women for being sexual beings - no more, no less.

The real question that needs to be asked here is this - just what gives a pharmacist the right to intervene between a patient and their doctor so arbitrarily? Generally speaking, when we are talking about treatment involving prescriptions, the pharmacist would only intervene if there was a second medication the patient was taking that would interact negatively with the prescribed treatments. I expect that such intervention would be a call back to the doctor, and possibly a follow up between doctor and patient - it's not the pharmacist's call to judge the moral implications of a given treatment.

You might almost thing this to be an American phenomenon - until you scrape a bit. As Dave at The Galloping Beaver points out, similar cases have occurred in Canada.

Linking things back to Canada's politics, I need to bring a few things forward. It's no secret that much of the Con caucus in Ottawa is linked to the religious right wing, and prominent characters like Jason Kenney have served on the boards of organizations such as "National Foundation for Family Research and Education", or the Catholic Civil Rights League. The CCRL is nothing new to most of us, and they are notoriously slavish to whatever edicts come out of Rome. The "National Foundation for Family Research and Education" I had to dig for a while to find much. A few of their publications are referenced by such august bodies as Focus on the Family - which is a red flag, but not overly significant. It wasn't until I found this article tying it back to the so-called "Calgary School" of right-wing neo-con politics that I fit it back into what I already know about Jason Kenney. (This group is significantly "underground", which suggests that they don't especially want to be noticed)

It doesn't take a lot of digging to link Jason Kenney back to the hard-line "family values" crowd that is so intent on punishing women for having sex. The Wikipedia entry for Rob Anders suggests ties between Anders and Focus on the Family and other evangelical lobby groups. It's not too hard to imagine just where the Harper Cons would try to go if they had a majority - and it's not a pretty place.

(If you want a good idea of what their ideal little world is, I strongly suggest reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.)