The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to decide whether pharmacists with strongly held religious beliefs can be forced to dispense emergency contraception to patients.
Justices did not explain their June 28 denial of Stormans, Inc. vs. Wiesman, but the decision was made over the objection of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. In his dissent, Associate Justice Alito wrote the court should have heard the case to ensure that novel and concededly “unnecessary burden on religious objectors” does not trample fundamental rights.
©jsmith/iStockphoto
“If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great concern,” he wrote in his dissent.
At issue in the case is a 2007 rule by Washington state that a family-owned pharmacy in Olympia must provide Plan B contraception to patients. The “delivery rule” creates “a duty for pharmacists to deliver lawfully prescribed drugs or devices in a timely manner and does not allow for conscience-based decisions not to dispense the drug. The Stormans family, who own Ralph’s Thriftway, sued the state over the regulation, alleging violations of the free exercise, equal protection, and due process clauses of the Constitution. The business owners equate emergency contraception to abortion, and they argue that dispensing the medication violates their religious beliefs.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state, calling the regulations “neutral and generally applicable.” The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. The denial by the high court allows the 9th Circuit decision to stand.
Nearly 20 court briefs were issued to the Supreme Court in the case, including briefs by the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and 4,609 individual health care professionals in support of the pharmacy.
“By effectively prohibiting exemptions for religious reasons, the state of Washington’s regulations depart radically from widely established norms within the health care industry protecting the individual conscience rights of health care professionals,” the health care professionals wrote in their brief. “Such norms favoring the freedom of conscience are particularly well established where, as here, the practitioner’s right to decline care applies to particular treatments, not to individual patients or classes of persons; and where, as here, declining treatment for reasons of religious conscience has no practical impact on quality or availability of care.”
On Twitter @legal_med