Victory for Pro-Choice Activists!
We did it! Earlier this week, to observe Back Up Your Birth Control Day, NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri along with our coalition partners, asked pro-choice activists across Missouri to call Senators Gibbons and Champion and demand a public hearing for SB 458, the Patient Protection Act.
Gibbons' and Champion's offices were flooded with phone calls from pro-choice Missourians--and we won! Now we need you to take action again to ensure that this important bill continues to make its way towards becoming a law.
Because of all of our efforts, a hearing has finally been scheduled for the Patient Protection Act. Now we must focus on getting this bill out of committee and on to the Senate floor for debate.
Please take action once more and email the members of the Senate Aging, Families and Mental Health Committee to urge them to support the Patient Protection Act. Click here to access the email addresses of the committee members.
Want to do even more to support the Patient Protection Act? Join NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri and others who support women’s access to birth control in Jefferson City on March 30th for the public hearing that you helped make possible. Contact Angie to find out more. 314.531.8616 or angie.postal@prochoicemissouri.org.
WHY IS THE PATIENT PROTECTION ACT NECESSARY?
Pharmacists are currently able to turn women away without filling prescriptions from their doctors. According to a 2000 survey by NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri Foundation’s Access Project, eighty-six (86) percent of pharmacies allow individual pharmacists to decide whether to fill a prescription for emergency contraception and sixty-seven (67) percent of pharmacists will not dispense emergency contraception to women with a prescription signed by a physician.
Doctors and health care providers, including pharmacists, have an ethical duty to ensure that patients receive medically accurate information and appropriate care. Failure to provide care or essential services—even for religious reasons—jeopardizes women’s health and violates bedrock principles of medical ethics.
WHAT WOULD THE PATIENT PROTECTION ACT DO?
The Patient Protection Act (SB 458) would require pharmacists to fulfill their professional responsibility to provide the basic standard of care by filling legal and safe prescriptions as written by a woman’s physician, including prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception.
SB 458 would require pharmacists to alert their employer in advance if they are unwilling to fill certain prescriptions, and to make accommodations that allow patients to get their prescriptions filled in a timely manner and “without undue hardship.”
WHY SHOULD THE AGING, FAMILIES AND MENTAL HEALTH COMMITTEE SUPPORT THE PATIENT PROTECTION ACT (SB 458)?
Recent national polling shows an overwhelming number of Americans do not believe that pharmacists should be able to refuse to fill lawful prescriptions. Eight in 10 Americans say pharmacists who personally oppose birth control for religious reasons should not refuse to sell oral contraceptives to women. (CBS News/NYTimes, 11.23.04)
Wider access to emergency contraception is perhaps the single most promising avenue for reducing this country’s high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion. In light of the inherent challenges to obtaining emergency contraception within the narrow window of opportunity and the proven merits of this contraceptive, it is critical that the barriers women confront when attempting to obtain this valuable and safe method are minimized. As the final link in the process of a woman obtaining contraceptives, this bill seeks to remove them as a barrier to access.
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