After a 20-year-old Tucson woman is raped, she wastes three days searching for a pharmacy that stocks the "morning after" pill, each day of her search reducing the chances of the drug working. "When she finally did find a pharmacy with it," reports the Arizona Daily Star, "she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections."

In Fort Worth, a CVS pharmacist tells Julee Lacey, 33, that she does not "believe in birth control" and will have to get her refill elsewhere. A San Diego County fertility clinic turns down a lesbian couple's request for artificial insemination not, the doctors say, because of their sexual orientation, but because they're not married. But gay marriage is illegal in California.

The American Pharmacists Association allows its members to refuse to fill prescriptions on moral grounds, as long as they refer their customers to a more open-minded colleague. But thirteen states have proposed or passed laws that would eliminate the referral requirement, and the trend is accelerating. Last year the Michigan State House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the "Conscientious Objector Policy Act," a statute that would allow doctors, emergency service technicians and pharmacists to refuse to treat patients or fill prescriptions on moral, ethnical and religious grounds.

"The explosion in the number of legislative initiatives and the number of individuals who are just saying, 'We're not going to fill that prescription for you because we don't believe in it' is astonishing," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

When a soldier refuses an order to shoot someone, it's virtually impossible to obtain "conscientious objector" status. A soldier who refuses to kill faces a court martial and possible prison sentence. But when a pharmacist refuses to dispense a drug that would prevent a woman from becoming pregnant with her rapist's child, he's merely "following his principles"--and enjoys the support of his state legislature.

Luke Vander Bleek, an Illinois pharmacist who says his Catholic faith led him to fight an Illinois rule that requires him to fill all prescriptions, including those for birth control, says: "I've always stopped short of dispensing any sort of product that I think endangers human life or puts the human embryo at risk."

But Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich takes the side of patients: "It's not the job of a drugstore or a pharmacist or someone who works in a drugstore to make those decisions or to pick and choose who gets birth control and who doesn't."

How can society reconcile these two competing, yet equally compelling interests? Surely a medical professional should not be forced to perform procedures or dole out drugs that violate his or her personal beliefs. I consider optional cosmetic surgery--face lifts, tummy tucks, boob jobs--degrading and obscene, symptoms of a shallow society's contempt for natural beauty and aging. If I were a doctor, I would refuse to perform these operations or refer patients to a physician that did. On the other hand, people should be able to walk into a fertility clinic with the reasonable expectation of getting help to conceive a baby--whether they're straight, gay, single or married.

Truthful advertising may prove more effective, and certainly more ethically sound, than a sweeping ban on discretion among healthcare professionals. For example, the Target store in Fenton, Missouri that refuses to fill birth control prescriptions--"I won't fill it, it's my right not to fill it," Target's pharmacist told a 26-year-old woman--should be forced to post a large back-lit sign outside its store to save would-be birth controllers the trouble of looking for parking. "No birth control," the sign could read, or perhaps "sluts stay away!" Similarly the St. Louis-area Walgreens that recently suspended its pharmacist-refuseniks for violating Illinois' don't ask, must fill rule could post the chain's support of reproductive rights out front.