So far, the official news that

these three were fired has not been released, but I with people intimately involved on background who confirmed that the three, all pro-life

Christians, have been fired by Eckerds. They are going to go public perhaps

today, depending on the advice of counsel. I must say that I was probably

overly optimistic yesterday by my reading of the Texas laws granting a

conscience exemption for health care providers who wish not to have anything

to do with an abortion. A sympathetic reader down in Austin points out that

state law defines “health care provider” (or is it “medical personnel”?) in

such a way as to exclude pharmacists. And a pro-life lawyer in Michigan

wrote to say that it’s highly unlikely that taking a pill that prevents

implantation of a fertilized ovum would qualify as abortion under state law.

So the Christian pharmacists may simply be out of luck, as well as out of a

job.

There has been some confusion over whether those pharmacists really were

refusing to participate in abortion. A couple of readers have written to say

that the “morning-after pill” is not abortifacent because it merely causes a

fertilized ovum, if one exists inside the woman, not to implant itself –

this, as opposed to RU-486, which dislodges the fertilized ovum after

implantation, which is to say, after pregnancy has officially begun. But if

one believes that life begins at conception, there is no question but that

the morning-after pill is abortifacent, morally, if not legally.

This raises a moral dilemma, spotted by an Oregon reader: “I might

understand the pharmacists’ decision if they had perviously refused to fill

all prescriptions for hormonal birth control because of the potential

abortifacent nature of the Pill. I doubt that’s the case.” That’s a very

good point. Many people who consider themselves ardent “life begins at

conception” pro-lifers use the birth-control pill without realizing that it

can work to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg — which is to say,

from their point of view, a human life. If I were a pharmacist, I don’t

think I could in good conscience dispense the Pill, and for this reason

alone. But an argument could be made that in the case of a woman who takes

the Pill for contraceptive reasons, the primary object would be to prevent

ovulation, not to prevent implantation of a fertilized ovum (which is a

secondary way in which the Pill works). If the Pill worked in an individual

case by preventing implantation, then that is morally unacceptable, but it

wasn’t necessarily intended. That arguably doesn’t relieve the woman of the

moral responsibility, but it does give the pharmacist who provides her with

the Pill more ethical wiggle room. However, in the case of the morning-after

pill, the direct object of its use would be to prevent the implantation of a

fertilized ovum.

I’m thinking this analogy might be helpful. Think of those pharmacists as

being like gun dealers faced with a customer who wants to buy a gun. The

sale would be perfectly legal, and the dealer has no idea to what use the

customer will put the gun. He might intend to use it to protect his family,

to hunt game — or to commit a crime. The dealer doesn’t know, and should

not be condemned for selling the gun. But consider the case in which a

customer comes in and says, “I want to shoot my wife.” That changes the

moral equation for the dealer, and his moral responsibility.

I stress moral, because the analogy fails on the legal question. Obviously,

it’s murder under the law for a man to shoot his wife, but it’s not legally

murder for a woman to abort her unborn child, or to take the morning-after

pill to prevent implantation; and presumably it would be illegal to sell a

gun to someone a dealer had clear reason to believe would use it to commit a

crime.