EC News

The New York Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed complaints with the New York State Department of Education's Office of Professions alleging that CVS and Rite Aid pharmacists refused to dispense refills of prescriptions for emergency contraception the AP/Long Island Newsday reports. The complaints were filed on behalf of three health care providers from Planned Parenthood Mohawk-Hudson who had prescribed refillable EC prescriptions. According to one of the complaints, a pharmacist at a CVS in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in November 2005 said he would fill a woman's EC prescription but would not provide refills. In addition, the pharmacist allegedly altered the valid prescription so that it listed no refills. PPMH practitioner Claudina Ashelman-Owen spoke with the pharmacist's supervisor, who said women who had the EC prescriptions were "irresponsible," according to the complaint. The supervisor allegedly defended the pharmacist's right to deny a refill, saying EC refills were a "bad idea," according to the complaint. A separate complaint alleges that a pharmacy manager at a Ride Aid pharmacy in Gloversville, N.Y., questioned a woman's prescription because it listed refills. The pharmacy manager disagreed with the prescription, saying EC should not be "treated as birth control," the complaint says. Elisabeth Benjamin, director of NYCLU's Reproductive Rights Project, said the complaints are different from conventional EC complaints because pharmacists objected to filling a refill but agreed to provide the initial prescription. Benjamin said, "These refusals seem to just be based solely on moralistic assumptions of women's sexuality."

In other EC realted news, physicians working in hospitals or clinics without religious affiliations are more likely than physicians working in religious-affiliated facilities to prescribe emergency contraception according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health, Reuters Health reports. The researchers created nine scenarios -- including whether participants would prescribe EC to a woman seeking a pregnancy test who is not pregnant and not using contraception; if they would prescribe EC over the phone; and whether they refill EC prescriptions. According to researchers, in seven of the nine situations, health workers in nonreligious-affiliated facilities more readily prescribed EC than those working in religious-affiliated facilities. The findings also show that 10.4% of providers in religious-affiliated institutions said that during a routine exam they "all or some of the time" would prescribe EC to women who were not using a continuous method of birth control, compared with 41.7% of those in nonreligious-affiliated practices. About one in four providers at religious-affiliated institutions said they encouraged women to fill EC prescriptions, compared with nearly half of health care providers in nonreligious-affiliated facilities, according to the findings. "The real take-home message is this medication needs to be over the counter because physicians are not doing a good job of getting it out there," Prine, one of the researchers said. According to Prine and her colleagues, "This survey demonstrates that religious affiliation clearly creates a deterrent to prescribing emergency contraception in a wide range of clinical scenarios. For women as consumers, they need to be wary of the affiliation of the offices where they get their medical care".