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I feel about people with strongly held religious convictions pretty much the the same way I feel about people who can juggle machetes and lit torches: I’m impressed and maybe a little envious, but please be careful around others.
That’s been on my mind after it was reported this week that a Walgreens pharmacist in Arizona refused for religious reasons to fill a woman’s prescription for a medicine to induce miscarriage.
The woman, Nicole Arteaga, 35, hadn’t wanted to abort the 9-week-old fetus. She was told by her doctor that it had stopped developing, and her choice was to either take a medication that would induce bleeding or seek a surgical alternative.
This is a sensitive area, I know. People and corporations have religious rights. But when religious beliefs manifest in the business world, questions naturally arise as to where lines can or should be drawn.
Put simply, does a worker’s right to practice his or her religion trump a consumer’s right to engage in a legal commercial transaction?
“It’s fair to say there are many possibilities for religious conflict in the commercial world,” said Helen Norton, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Every expert I spoke with about the Walgreens case said the company likely acted correctly. It accommodated a worker’s religious beliefs while also avoiding undue hardship for the customer by allowing her to fill her prescription at a nearby store.
The company said in a statement that it “allows pharmacists to step away from filling a prescription for which they have a moral objection.” In such situations, it said, the pharmacist “is required to refer the prescription to another pharmacist or manager on duty to meet the patient’s needs in a timely manner.”
For her part, Arteaga said on Facebook that she “left Walgreens in tears, ashamed and feeling humiliated by a man who knows nothing of my struggles but feels it is his right to deny medication prescribed to me by my doctor.”My feeling is that things have gotten out of hand. There was the Hobby Lobby case in 2014 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that family-owned […]