As some of you know, I am in the middle of trying to move my ass from Arizona to Ohio. (Well, if it were only my ass, things would be going far more easily, but I digress.) I threw out both my back and my neck while cleaning out my closet (shut up Second Nature), so last night I was eating

fistfuls
fists full

lots of percocet and catching up a little on blogs and news and such.

And I stumbled across this at Pandagon:

…some wingnut pharmacists are moving beyond merely denying women their birth control pills, but are now deciding that women who abort are obligated to get a nasty, potentially fatal infection. Because nothing says “pro-life” like trying to kill someone for being a nasty, sex-having whore.

(If you give a shit about women’s equality and you’re not already reading Amanda, then you should be. Brilliant and hilarious, that one, and due to the FP posters as well as the comment community, reading Pandagon can give you a good general education regarding the variety of modern feminist takes on sociopolitical issues. It can also disabuse you of some of the bullshit arguments forwarded by anti-feminists that some folks on the left believe are actually true, because the bias in the MSM isn’t just anti-left, it’s also anti-feminist.)

It seems a complaint was filed with the Washington State Department of Health this week because that contingency of nutjob pharmacists who likes to think they’re more moral than the rest of us is now taking this “punish the sluts” thing to a whole ‘nother level.

According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was “morally unable” to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River’s complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager’s May 17, 2005, e-mail account: “Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription… to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in… and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription.”

Cedar River Clinics, in case you hadn’t worked it out, is a women’s health center with several locations in WA, and it also offers abortion services. So these lunatics, who already seem to think they have an unassailable right to interfere with women’s medical reproductive choices, are now extending that interference to withholding antibiotics from women they deem unworthy. “Let the sluts die”, I guess, is the logic here. Because that’s pro-life, or something. As was pointed out in the Pandagon thread, even prisoners on death row are entitled to antibiotics. These pharmacists are unilaterally demoting law-abiding women to a status below that of prisoners on death row.

Oh, but wait, there’s more:

The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she “didn’t need them if she wasn’t pregnant.”

wtf? Why should any pharmacist have any business to question why any woman chooses any particular medical facility? And why in the hell would a pharmacist withhold pre-natal vitamins, under any circumstances? Even reaching down into the deepest, darkest, wingnuttiest recesses of my brain — and I’m related to these people, I do understand them to an extent — I cannot imagine a scenario in which that makes any more sense than skull-fucking as an after school hobby, not even under their own totally logic-free worldview. What the hell happened to protecting the fetus at all costs? Not if the fetus’ slut mother went to a clinic where they perform abortions on other women, I guess; that fetus is now tainted by association and cannot be given the vitamins that fetus-carriers who see properly moral doctors can have. Seriously, wtf?

There’s been some defense of these controlling lunatics by people on the left, and not nearly enough condemnation from the whole left or from Democratic politicians. (Credit where it’s due, some Dems are bravely fighting this, like the gov there in IL, and I applaud them.) Some people, even on the left, even while they fight for the rights of all kinds of other groups, still seem to think that pharmacists do have a right to withhold medication at their own discretion based on nothing other than their personal moral judgment.

I’ve been wondering whether these folks are only making excuses for this outrageous behavior because they are, in various ways, duped into believing that a fetus should have more rights than the woman it requires use of in order to survive and grow into a baby, but I don’t really know. We’d have to see whether they’d hold their positions when their own heart medication was withheld in every pharmacy for 200 miles just because the pharmacists decided that they didn’t morally approve of some facet of their lifestyle.

But I’m curious. At this point, does anyone here honestly continue to believe that any of this is really about babies? Or is it yet becoming clear to people that the “moral issue” that is at stake here, even when the lunatics say it’s about babies, is really women’s very basic and fundamental rights to both privacy and bodily autonomy? Is it obvious yet to the folks who originally bought the whole “moral/baby” line of bullshit that this behavior is really about controlling women’s sexuality — and at the threat of death, if necessary?

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