Christian Taliban

They not only want to tell us how to run our lives. They want to tell us how to run our health.

A pharmacy in Montana is one of the latest to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. The owners are devout Catholics and fiercely anti-abortion, and they seem to buy into the reasoning that oral contraceptives are abortifacients and immoral.

The irony is that the woman who raised the media coverage about this is 49 years old and infertile. She takes birth control pills for other medical reasons. But from the pharmacists' point of view, it's apparently better to maintain self-righteous indignation and screw the patient.

Not that it matters why she wanted the pills. When a woman and her doctor decide that birth control pills are the right choice for the woman's need, whether that's a desire to not get knocked up or to find relief from endometriosis, and the doctor writes the prescription, it's legitimate.

It's legitimate, and it's legal, and it's appalling that pharmacists would interfere with doctor-patient decisions by refusing to fill prescriptions.

But they're a private business, some argue. They have a right to decide what they will and won't stock, just like a shoe store, they say. Sorry, the analogy doesn't fly. They're a private business that is licensed by the state. They are licensed because they play an important role in public health. The state doesn't license shoe stores because there's no real public health risk or need associated with the sale of shoes. There are strong public health risks and benefits attached to pharmacies, which is why they don't get to play by the exact same rules as other private businesses.

Besides which, pharmacists (unlike shoe salesmen) take an oath. The first two parts of the are: I will consider the welfare of humanity and relief of human suffering my primary concerns, and I will apply my knowledge, experience, and skills to the best of my ability to assure optimal drug therapy outcomes for the patients I serve.

I don't see that they're showing much concern for human suffering or the patient.

In this case in this city, there are other pharmacies. Women still have other options. If this were an isolated instance, I might ignore it. But it's not an isolated instance. The next time it happens, it might be in a small community with only one pharmacy in town. Then what do women do?

There is an active anti-contraception movement. The New York Times ran a long article on it last year. Nothing much has improved since then. There are anti-contraception websites like noroomforcontraception.com, which preach the notion that contraception leads to moral decay and an increase in abortion (you go ahead and make sense of that one - I can't).

When you follow these things to their logical conclusion, it all comes down to an extremist attempt to control women's sexuality, to return women to the status of breeding stock. It's burkas without the handy sun protection. It's so so wrong.