Reproductive Rights

Every time I read about this topic, I'm more and more amazed and how important this seems to be to this administration. We have war, inflation, a housing market in collapse and a stock market that seems determined to tank and yet they'd rather spend their times declaring contraception as a form of abortion.

If you read at the above link, you'll find out that the Dept. of Health and Human Services is attempting to change the definition of pregnancy from the scientifically proven to the religiously absurd. Rather than using the moment when the egg is implanted to the womb, they want it changed to the moment the egg is fertilized. So there would be no way to prove when a woman was actually impregnated. Their concern involves that good old bullshit from the right wherein pharmacists and medical practitioners should have the ability to choose based on their conscience whether to provide services. It goes along with the idea that if you don't believe birth control pills should be used because it says it somewhere in the bible(it doesn't) then you don't have to sell them to anyone ever.

Why does it matter? Well let's look at it from two main points that I see at issue.
First, if you live in an area where there is really only one or two pharmacists in the immediate area, you don't get your prescription.
Second, we're allowing the advice and counsel of a medical professional of your choosing to be circumvented by a person working for a drugstore that you didn't hire.

In the first issue, it's a matter of availability. There is still quite a lot of rural America. And the last I checked, the average family in those regions isn't pulling in mega dollars. So basically we're actually preventing the poorer people of our nation from preventing the huge burden of raising a child.
In the second case, it's allowing some random person to affect your health care services. It's allowing a person with an ethical dilemma to make a medical decision. That is not something that should be happening at the drug store.

I guess where I'm going with all of this is that the implications of policies like this are far broader than one might think. It's designed to have a veil of legitimacy. "I think people should have the right to choose their religion, don't you?" But it's design is to further push away the rights of women to choose for themselves.

If you have a problem with a drug or a product that a pharmacy sells, you shouldn't be a pharmacist. When I go to the store to buy something, if someone tells me that they don't want to sell it based on conscience, my first act is to figure out why that person hasn't been fired yet. Enjoy your religion. Live in it to your deepest desire. But don't darken my doorway with your bullshit politics. Read your bible.

Then read this post.