by Matt Barr

We're all pro-choice here!

You may recall that I favor a willing buyer/willing seller solution to the pharmacists "conscience clause" issue in Illinois. The state (via Super Emergency Executive Powers) now requires pharmacists to dispense prescriptions they're presented regardless of their moral objections. My more nuanced if completely un-novel approach would be to allow a pharmacist to decline to fill a prescription, provided there was another pharmacist around to do so without putting the patient out too much; protect the patient from being hectored and lectured (there is this brand new right to be left alone in the Constitution, y'know); and let the market figure out how this all goes over.

You'll find lots of people not patronizing a pharmacy where they risk being referred elsewhere. You'll find probably fewer, but some, people who will go out of their way to patronize a store where pharmacists share their customers' beliefs. Last Osco standing wins. More likely, you'll have Oscos and Walgreens and Rite Aids and whatevers, just like you have now, and people deciding which one to shop at based on whatever is important to them. I told you it was un-novel. If someone besides government can do it, it's always a good idea to keep government out of it to the best extent possible.

Alternatively, since there's no law in Illinois requiring doctors to write birth control prescriptions in the first place, as far as I know, let's write us up one of those, and see how far we get in Springfield. If nothing else, the radioactivity of and pushback on such a brazen attempt to regulate well-heeled, well-represented doctors would make it clear that this assault on pharmacists isn't an access to health care issue, it's a Christmas tree ornament that drives fundraising. (Not that there's any money involved in abortion rights advocacy! See also!) Although, Illinois is already restricting the use of ultrasounds in prenatal care last I heard, which is in fact telling doctors they can't say something the state would rather they not, so maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised.

Anyhoo, here it turns out that Illinois is going to require pharmacies to hang a poster letting its customers know it complies with the law. I have one of those posted in my palatial home office:

While this represents the state making me say something whether I want to say it or not, and prescribing what it is I have to say, it's hard to get bent out of shape about it. The law says employers have to give their employees -- me -- posted notice that it's up to me to prove my workplace injury wasn't caused by alcohol or drugs. Big deal. It's true, for one thing, that is the law, and there is a good policy reason to be sure that every employee in Ohio knows they're not entitled to workers' compensation if they hurt themselves while stoned. (Or had constructive notice of same, the world being run, thankfully, by lawyers.)

But the Illinois poster sort of doesn't look like the one above. It looks like this:

(Via Mirror of Justice.) It's more saying, "Losers! Think of all that knowing-in-a-Biblical-sense going on around you! Bwah ha ha!" Don't you think? But again, fine; the point, as we know, is to agitate for donations, and better to be all in your face than Ohio BWC for that purpose.

But at what point do we have a First Amendment problem here? The poster includes facts, for which there is arguably an important public policy justification to have publicized. But is "no one should stand between a woman and her doctor" a fact? (Is a big birth control pill case?) And is there any important public policy reason to make every pharmacy in Illinois say it? When you think about it, if that sentence is true, there shouldn't be any pharmacists or pharmacies at all.

Ohio doesn't make me proclaim in 24-point type that "no one should recover from the Workers' Compensation Fund if they were drunk." It's not true, first of all -- you're disqualified if being drunk was the proximate cause of your injury. Much the same way "no one should come between a woman and her doctor" isn't true.

But beyond that, is anyone, pro-choice, pro-life, pro-death, pro-Blagojevich, whatever, honestly prepared to argue the Illinois poster isn't supposed to be making a political point? So now the state can force employers to speak and prescribe that the content of that speech must be an opinion favored by the state?

In which country?

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