JESUS LOVES YOU AND WANTS YOU TO HAVE YOUR RAPIST'S CHILD

Chipping away at Roe ...

...A little-noticed provision cleared the House of Representatives last week that would prohibit local, state or federal authorities from requiring any institution or health care professional to provide abortions, pay for them, or make abortion-related referrals, even in cases of rape or medical emergency.

In Mississippi, a bill became law in July that admirers and critics consider the nation's most sweeping "conscience clause." It allows all types of health care workers and facilities to refuse performing virtually any service they object to on moral or religious grounds.

And in states across the country, anti-abortion organizations and a group called Pharmacists for Life are encouraging pharmacists to refuse to distribute emergency contraceptives, which they consider a potential form of abortion....

Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, was fired by Kmart in 1996 for refusing to dispense a birth-control drug....

Brauer, who lives in Lawrence, Ind., and works at a drugstore in Ohio, hopes more states will emulate Mississippi, South Dakota and Arkansas by specifying that pharmacists, as well as doctors, have the right to withhold services on moral grounds. She does not believe there should be any obligation to refer rebuffed customers to another pharmacist who would fill their prescription.

"Forced referral is stupid," she said. "If we're not going to kill a human being, we're not going to help the customer go do it somewhere else." ...

--AP

By the way, here's a story from the Web site of Pharmacists for Life about a pharmacist who won't fill prescriptions for birth-control pills.

Where does this end? What if your "conscience" tells you you shouldn't use a defibrillator on a gay person who's having a heart attack ... or on a Muslim, or a Democrat? What's the limit?