Mother Jones
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When Brittany Cartrett lost her pregnancy in March, her doctor prescribed Misoprostol to help her complete the miscarriage. The drug, which would allow her to avoid a more invasive surgical procedure, is the same one used to induce many abortions. Which is why, Cartrett suspects, two different pharmacies in central Georgia refused to fill her prescription.
Cartrett slammed one of those pharmacies, the Walmart in Milledgeville, Georgia, in a Facebook post published last week. When she asked the pharmacist why she wouldn’t fill her prescription, Cartrett claims, “She looks at me over her nose and says, ‘Because I couldn’t think of a reason why you would need that prescription.'” Cartrett says she then explained that she’d had a miscarriage, and the pharmacist replied, “I don’t feel like there is a reason why you would need it, so we refused to fill it.”
Cartrett is blaming the incident on a law, passed 15 years ago, that guarantees pharmacists the right to refuse to provide contraceptives or abortifacients on religious or conscientious grounds. Georgia is one of six states with such a law on the books. Six other states have broad “refusal clauses,” as they are known, that don’t specifically mention pharmacists but would likely protect them in the event of legal action, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank.
Walmart, however, disputes that its pharmacist refused to fill the prescription on principal. She refused, says Brian Nick, a company spokesman, because the prescription did not follow FDA guidelines.
“The customer had a specific theory as to why the drug wasn’t filled, which gets into what some call the conscience clause,” Nick told Mother Jones. “The reality at the store level is that the pharmacist had a professional judgment call against filling the prescription, not any other reason. They’re well within their rights, the pharmacists, to not agree that a specific prescription should be filled.”
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The Scary Law That Allowed Pharmacists to Deny This Woman the Drugs She Needed After Her Miscarriage
