Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

An article in the Washington Post, ‘Pro-Life’ Drugstores Market Beliefs: No Contraceptives For Chantilly Shop, introduced me to the concept of a “Pro-life Drugstore.” This is a place were prescriptions are filled, but not for prophylactics, birth control, or Plan-B:

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

“The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience — that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral,” said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. “Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing,” Brejcha said.

They cite a think tank who has the same immediate objection that comes to my mind:

“If you are a health-care professional, you are bound by professional obligations,” said Nancy Berlinger, deputy director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y. “You can’t say you won’t do part of that profession.”

There’s a good article here about why faith must not trump the Hippocratic oath. It’s for the same reason that in diagnosis Doctors follow established statistical treatment plans; they’re proven to optimally treat patients. Some religions don’t allow blood-transfusions, yet they are critical processes for recovery in many severe traumas. As a medical professional, can you ethically refuse to dispense a medication simply because you find it personally distasteful?

So far, the answer is clearly no. Go vote yourself on Expelled: The Movement’s website.

I don’t buy the religious argument that getting the HPV vaccine for young women is immoral. HPV is a nasty, prevalent virus and should be eradicated with as much expediency as possible:

Gardasil, which was approved by the FDA last June, protects against four strains of human papillomavirus (HPV). Two are believed to cause 70% of cervical cancer, which strikes about 11,000 U.S. women a year. The other two strains cause 90% of genital warts–so the vaccine is a twofer.

According to the Time article, 40% of women carry the virus 2 years after sexual maturity, say at 18 years of age. By age 50, 80% of women have it in some form or another. Let’s assume the vaccine Gardasil was 90% efficient in preventing HPV; then after 50 years just 8% of women would carry the virus. Assuming everyone in America decided to vaccinate their daughters, they would see their great-grandchildren’s generation entirely disease free:

This is simply the converging sequence population*(1 - effective rate)^n. There are other factors to take into account, like the number of people who opt to receive the vaccine, which will initially be quite low, combined with the likelyhood of them being a transmitter of the virus. Since my math is sketchy tonight I feel like modeling a markov chain, but suffice to say, preventing America’s young women from contracting HPV is a good thing.

Enlighten me where Christianity comes in, please? You could argue that educating your daughters will in the future promote their immorality because they will become erudite objects of desire, and it would be nearly parallel and equally nonsensical. Never let religion stand in the way of medicine.

Science versus Faith, reformatted for vertical layout:

Now, please don’t kill me for posting this.

I’ve watched people I know read the book of Job as some kind of literal truth, but there are problems with internal consistency. Perhaps because the book, like most of the Bible, is a continuously evolving myth–renowned Assyriologist and Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer found a Sumerian text that evinces a remarkable parallel–it can’t possibly make sense in any other context but as an oral story, or series of impressions.

This video does an excellent job of pointing out the ridiculous and symbolically repetitive dialog between God and Satan, the problems with the plot, and the injustice present in all that happens to Job.