I have willfully not been paying attention to the anti-birth control pharmacists, though Bitch Ph.D. nailed them almost a week ago. Then yesterday, as usual a good two weeks after a New York Times article on the same topic, Red State Capital City Newspaper had a front page story on pharmacists refusing to dispense the morning after pill, spotlighting Pharmacists for Life International (whose homepage proudly links to lots of articles).
I’m having trouble with this one. The secular science-based feminist in me is going ballistic: This is medicine! This is a woman’s right to receive medical treatment! This is doctor’s prescriptions! This is no place for imposing personal beliefs on workplace responsibilities! This is choice! And I really do believe all those things, passionately.
At the same time, I’m thinking about civil disobedience. I’m thinking about Thoreau, and Woolworth’s sit-ins, and conscientious objectors, and tax resistance. I’m thinking about trespassing at nuclear power plants, and refusing to leave the shanties we built to protest our university’s investments in South Africa. And I know this is what they want me to think, these pharmacists who believe they are standing up for what is right in the face of injustice. I know I’m falling for their appropriation of our rhetoric.
But if I have accepted, a la Thoreau, that “if [injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law,” can I really stipulate that mine is the only definition of injustice?
Is this hopeless moral relativism? Am I failing the cause? I think these pharmacists are so unethical, so manipulative, so wrong, but that is because I disagree with their position so profoundly. Can I really condemn their tactics? I’m not quite sure.
4 comments:
But they aren't exhibiting social disobediance, they're just not doing their job. When you built a university shanty town were you failing to do a job you'd signed up for? With an implicit (or more likely explicit) set of responsibilities? I think not.
THANK YOU for forcing me to think about this.
I think Thalia's right, that there's a difference between Thoreau not paying his taxes (or you building shanties) and the pharmacists, though I had not been able to articulate it for myself until now. As pharmacists, their job is to dispense the drugs prescribed by doctors. If they find this job morally repugnant, they can quit. They can agitate to change the law. They can work towards providing other options. But you only break the law when that's your only option--Thoreau had no other way of opposing an immoral tax than not to pay it, for example. If you can find a legal way to oppose an action you find repugnant, I think it's your duty to do that first. And quitting would be that way, in this case. (sez me, who would of course be hard-pressed to find another job if I felt morally obliged to quit this one...I'm not saying it's easy, but I think that's the deal, anyway.)
I understand your dilema but my course of (re)action would be to boycott this phamacy. He is standing up for what he believes is right. We have no other choice but to take our business elsewhere. He voted for Bush, you voted for Kerry (maybe by default)...he won that one, but now he is your enemy.
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