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Source: Southtown Star

Date: 27-Jun-2008

The face of pro-life has grown an ugly new wart.

The Washington Post, as well as a "movement for human rights" group called Watchmen on the Walls, proclaimed in the news last week that a convenient strip-mall "pro-life pharmacy" was about to open in a Washington, D.C., suburb. It is anticipated that others will follow the handful of pioneering drugstores for the Superholy.

But the pro-life DMC Pharmacy in Chantilly, Va., takes conscience into the realm of the holier-than-thou by refusing even to sell condoms. Behold the leaven of the Pharisees.

Whether one believes pharmacists should remain licensed as professionals even when they refuse to do their jobs, or whether one agrees with Gov. Rod Blagojevich that they should take their highly evolved consciences and find another profession - those handy packs of condoms will be absent at DMC and at a pro-life drugstore coming your way soon.

Yes. We're not talking refusal to fill a scrip for Plan B, which has the potential to destroy fertilized ovum - and ignores the fact of nature that it usually takes days for those little swimmers to find their target. (This means, on the morning after, there is probably not a baby. Or even on the morning after the morning after.) Still, one murdered sperm-and-egg is one too many for the Superholy.

DMC didn't stop at refusing women their birth control pills, either. The God-fearing fear some of those pills work not by preventing conception, but sometimes by preventing implantation of the newly acquainted sperm and ovum.

The refusal to sell good old condoms is not because anyone learned that condoms kill babies, though I'm sure someone is working on developing that story. No. It's because condoms promote a promiscuous lifestyle.

That's right. The more-chaste-than-thou have decided they will not help you stay safe when you sin. You'll have to bear the weight of your sin as you cross the street to buy condoms at another, more licentious retailer.

This branch of the pro-life movement has expanded its mission to include butting into your lifestyle choices. Also absent from the drugstores of the Superholy may be porn mags, cigarettes and even rolling papers, because certainly no good can come of them. Phallic-shaped shaving gel containers may be next.

It's a departure into deep self-righteousness and loathsome busy-bodying.

Yet the refusal to sell condoms remains more justifiable than the refusal to dispense a legally prescribed drug.

One is about the free market. The latter is about professionalism, or the lack thereof.

I argued not so long ago against banning smoking in bars and restaurants because, I wrote, the market could bring about smoke-free establishments by demand. No one is forced to patronize a smoky joint, or to work in one, for that matter.

If Superholy retail stores want to refuse to stock a common and highly popular item like the condom, that is their brilliant business choice to make; it is their conscience to guard. Certainly there are those holier-than-the-rest who will patronize the Superholy markets.

But to refuse to dispense certain prescription drugs is a failure to fulfill the professional function a pharmacy sets out to fill.

The Thomas More Society is busy, busy defending pharmacists' right of conscience, the right, as one pro-life pharmacist called it, to "opt out." Pharmacists for Life International calls Blagojevich "The Dictator of the Midwest" because he, in 2005, told Walgreens pharmacists to do their jobs and dispense legal drugs by prescription or find a new job.

When I was a 17-year-old waitress, I found myself shocked and appalled by the dining choices of certain customers. I saw people who, sadly, could not sit in booths, but only at tables they could push back from; these same extra-large customers ordered heaps of deadly fried foods, sweet drinks, fatty meats, starchy starches and then, of course, dessert.

Imagine if I had refused to serve them. Would anyone have defended my job, when my boss promptly fired me? I doubt it. How are pharmacists different? Is killing yourself slowly by overeating less sinful than taking birth control pills, or than whatever people are doing with those condoms? Maybe the Superholy should ask God about it.

Meanwhile, the big losers in the pro-life pharmacy scheme could be rural women, for whom obtaining contraception may become a problem, if there is not another pharmacy across the parking lot.

I wonder if the Superholy are - as they plan for more pro-life pharmacies - also planning ways to minister to the unwanted children of the rural poor in the decades ahead? I doubt that, too.