Marin Gillis is an Assistant Professor of Health Care Ethics and Philosophy and Co-Director of the Medical Humanities Research Group at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, MA. Her scholarship includes the ethics pharmacist refusal to dispense emergency contraception, pharmacogenomics, and the ethics of embryonic stem cell research with a particular concern for the commodification of women's reproductive material. She holds two graduate degrees in philosophy, an LPh. Higher Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven and a PhD from the University of Calgary. She was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow. She is a Steering Committee Member of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory and a member of the American Philosophical Association, The Society for Philosophy and Technology, and the American Association of Practical and Professional Ethics.

Presentation: Women's reproductive rights and pharmacist claims of a moral right not to dispense Plan B

This presentation concerns the interference with women's reproductive rights in the form of a pharmacist's claim of a moral right to refuse to dispense the drug known as Plan B (levonorgestrel) to women who have legal prescriptions for it.

On the face of it, the controversy over dispensing Plan B is part of abortion politics. Some believe that pharmacists have a moral right not to be complicit with an action whose perceived intent is the killing of an innocent. Plan B is therefore seen as a form of chemical abortion. Others claim that a way around the abortion politics here is to point out that the mechanism of levonorgestrel is really contraceptive and not abortafacient. Since there is no innocent that risks chemical death, the asis of this ethical controversy disappears. However, I contend that the fact of the drug's mechanism does not defeat the conscientious objection argument because some pharmacists, like some who work in the new Florida city Ave Maria, think that contraception is inherently wrong. The pro-life position is not only anti-abortion but anti-contraception. What defeats the claim that a pharmacist has a moral right not to dispense levonorgestrel is that it is morally unacceptable to deny a woman a legal prescription to oral contraceptives.