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if they're going to do it and can't be talked out of it I'd rather they didn't do it in the back alley where they themselves are at more risk. But I think the most important thing is to discourage it being done and encouraging other choices and safer/more protected sex practices to begin with.

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Zogby is secretly a dem, though he tries to be neutral, but he wants to make sure that future demographics support the democratic party

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rape-pregnancies, etc. Were already going on, and were, prior to the insitution of widescale elective abortions, a few hundred a year

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contraception and education is not part of the abortion restrictions

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Neil Noesen, a relief pharmacist at the Kmart in Menomonie, Wis., was the only person on duty one day in 2002 when a woman came in to refill her prescription for the contraceptive Loestrin FE. According to a complaint filed by the Wisconsin department of regulation and licensing, Noesen refused because of his religious opposition to birth control. He also declined to transfer the prescription to a nearby pharmacy and refused once again when the woman returned to the store with police.

The American Pharmacists Association says pharmacists should be allowed to refuse to fill a prescription. If they do, however, it ought to be filled by someone else or transferred to another pharmacy, the group has said

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two states, South Dakota and Arkansas, have passed laws that explicitly protect pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions on moral or religious grounds. Similar legislation has been introduced in 13 other states. Karen Brauer, who says she was fired by Kmart in 1996 for refusing to fill a birth-control prescription and is now president of Pharmacists for Life, says such laws are needed. "Pharmacists are being expected to do things that they do not believe they should do," she says.

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But it’s not just about contraception any more: It’s also about the right to have children. Pamela reports that a woman in California was refused IVF treatment by a doctor who said that treating her would be against his religion.

Now why in the world would a doctor who disagrees with IVF be working at a fertility clinic, you ask? Because he doesn’t oppose IVF, exactly — he just doesn’t like lesbians, and this woman happened to be one.

But at least they’re being honest here: It’s not about “life.” It’s not about babies. It’s about social control. It’s about whose lives are deemed worthy, and which choices fit into the narrow worldview of religious conservatives. The “pro-life” opposition to abortion and contraception doesn’t come from a serious concern for all those fertilized egg-babies out there; it comes out of a concern for changing gender roles, and the evolution of the family into a unit that is increasingly non-patriarchal, egalitarian and diverse. It’s very much about a class of viewpoints: The feminist/humanist/scientific/modern view, which wants to allow individuals the right to self-determination, and the conservative/regressive view, which wants to take us back to a Golden Era of the family that never actually existed in real life, wherein men were in charge and women knew their place.

It’s a vision that most people in this country don’t want — which is why anti-choicers and conservatives have to hang their arguments on abortion and babies. But as this case shows, it’s not about that at all. It’s about flat-out hostility towards women who buck the role these men would like to pin on them.

Now, to be clear, I do think that conscience clauses have a reasonable place. I don’t think that doctors, nurses or other medical professionals should be forced to perform any procedure the patient wants, even if it violates the doctor’s moral/ethical standards. But I do think that medical professionals should have to do the job they signed up for. That is, if you’re a dermatologist, I can see why it’s not reasonable to expect you to perform an abortion or write someone a birth control prescription. If you went into plastic surgery, you probably shouldn’t be required to freeze someone’s eggs or try in-vitro fertilization just because your patient asks you to. But if the thing you object to is a part of the normal course of your job, and was a totally foreseeable consequences of you taking that job, I don’t have much sympathy.

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