Accommodation.

More-or-less local story:   Wisconsin court upholds sanctions for pharmacist who refused to dispense birth-control pills. 

Noesen, 34, of St. Paul, Minn., told regulators that he is a devout Roman Catholic and refused to refill the prescription or release it to another pharmacy because he didn't want to commit a sin by "impairing the fertility of a human being."

The Pharmacy Examining Board ruled in 2005 that Noesen failed to carry out his professional responsibility to get the woman's prescription to someone else if he wouldn't fill it himself.

The board reprimanded Noesen and ordered him to attend ethics classes. He was allowed to keep his license as long as he informs all future employers in writing that he won't dispense birth control pills and outlines steps he will take to make sure a patient has access to medication.

The board also found Noesen liable for the cost of the proceedings against him — about $20,000 — but the appeals court ordered the board to reconsider that decision.

I think the trend on the Catholic blogosphere is to support lawsuits like these -- lawsuits that aim to restrain pharmacists' employers from disciplining their employees who refuse, on religious or moral grounds, to fill prescriptions for birth control pills.

So maybe I'll take flak for it -- but I don't agree.

A medical professional of any type has a right to act according to his or her conscience.  He or she has a responsibility to do so.   And if carefully considered conscience concludes that to fill a certain prescription is material and proximate cooperation with evil, well, then, the principled pharmacist won't fill it.

And might be fired, of course, because the job contract specifies that you're going to do the work you're assigned.  And might have trouble finding a job later, because the only job you'll be fit for is one that doesn't require you to violate your conscience.  Might even have to change careers in the end.

Such is the way of the cross.   

The board acted very reasonably in requiring the pharmacist to inform potential employers, in advance, in writing, that he would not fill or transfer certain prescriptions on moral grounds.  It hardly seems charitable for him to keep that a secret until it becomes an issue.  He's not truly being "forced" to fill prescriptions.  He is, after all, free to quit.

It reminds me a little bit of another local kerfuffle:  The airport cabbies who wouldn't carry alcohol or seeing eye dogs (4800 people were refused service from 2002 to 2007). The cabbies were threatened with discipline (losing their airport-service license if they refused to serve a customer). They argued "religious discrimination."  But the Airport Commission stuck to their guns, and rightly so.   Nobody says you have to work driving taxis to and from the airport.  If you don't like who or what the job requires you to drive around, you can get another job.  This was not a case of religious discrimination.  Rather it was a case of refusing religious accommodation.     Not at all the same thing -- in fact they're close to opposites.  The airport commission wanted everyone to play by the same rules regardless of his religion. 

There's a place to fight for the right of conscience, because some proposed restrictions on people and institutions are quite unreasonable.  The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in 1995 required all OB/GYN residency programs to provide routine abortion training.  Most OB/GYNS (90% was the 1997 estimate by the president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists) don't routinely perform abortions; everyone is perfectly aware that there are plenty of doctors -- and medical students -- who don't want to perform elective abortions; everyone is also perfectly aware that there are a number of medical schools whose institutional values are opposed to them; surely, schools ought to be left free to say "We don't do elective abortions here, so if you're really itching to learn by doing, go apply somewhere else."   

But it's just not unreasonable for an employer to fire someone who won't do the job they're explicitly hired to perform.    If the job requires you to violate your conscience, don't take the job.  No job is worth it.