Pro-choice means never allowing conscience

Last month, the state of Washington (read Governor Christine Gregoire pressuring the oversight board) adopted a policy to force pharmacists to dispense the emergency contraception known as Plan B (or the morning-after pill). In response, Dr. Jerome Wernow of Northwest Center of BioEthics and a licensed pharmacist (he is also my pastor) wrote the following editorial for The Columbian (Vancouver, WA). The Columbian did not publish it because Dr. Wernow objected to their editing his piece without permitting him to approve of their changes before they published it.

Dr. Wernow has given permission for his unedited editorial to be printed here:

Healthcare without Conscience

Friday the 13th of April was reported as a banner day for women’s reproductive access in Washington, as pharmacists must now set aside their conscience and dispense Plan B contraception. As one editorial put it, it was a “welcome end to a political fight disguised as morality.” As a pharmacist and ethicist, I mused over just what women - and for that matter residents of Washington - had won. Women won the right to force pharmacists with conscience to participate in the dispensing of chemicals that might stop pregnancy, a claim that even Planned Parenthood board member Dr. James Tressel finds dubious in a recent study. Conscientious objection to forced participation in the termination of pregnancy, which has been honored since the Frank Church Amendment in 1973 (and is not a new idea, as one ill-informed pharmacy board member asserts) is now discarded.

A NARAL shill and pharmacy board member claims another victory, one for the majority and for pharmacists who can “separate their personal beliefs from their professional duties.“ Surely, her opinion was not informed by the HCD pharmacy survey that revealed 69% of pharmacists supported conscientious objection, was it? Has she read Robert Jay Lifton’s notion of “doubling” that accounted for Nazi doctors being brutal in their camp practice yet civil and respectable at home and in the public? Does she or the rest of the board really understand that those who claim to have a conscience claim it as part of their being and not an extraneous add-on for Sunday worship?

As curious as the answers to these questions might be, they are not what cause me pause or perhaps recollection of horror. That is reserved for something much larger, a victory that is much more disturbing. It is a victory of the power brokers, the instruments they command, the media that reports without question, and the public that is largely silent. Under Planned Parenthood’s “Pill Patrol,” “secret shoppers “ are sought as undercover agents to ferret out pharmacists who choose not to comply in dispensing Plan B medications and report them. The pharmacy board threatens to strip these professionals of their license, and the governor demands the new rules be kept. Does this not ring with similarities to the unofficial informants of Stasi in former communist Germany? Can the stripping of pharmacists of their wealth and means easily be separated from memories of Krystalnacht? How about a recent newspaper cartoon caricaturing a religious catholic pharmacist determining whether to dispense or not? How is this different from the propaganda of Goebbels, particularly when conscience is to be set aside? Maybe f those who “think they are free,” as said by author Milton Meyer, consider my query too derogatory or too large of a leap. I hope they are right and that the loss of freedom and tolerance I sense does not escalate to such proportions that “it becomes too late” to escape the terrible consequence of such perceived victories by the “majority.”

Jerome R. Wernow R.Ph., Ph.D. is a licensed pharmacist and directs the Northwest Center for Bioethics