Last week, the ACLU of New Mexico and the Southwest Women’s Law Center filed complaints against Walgreens, alleging sex discrimination after a pharmacist refused to fill one of a female patient’s medications. The complaints are in response to a 2016 Walgreens visit, Teen Vogue reports:
A 13-year-old in Albuquerque was prescribed an IUD to treat menstrual issues when other forms of birth control didn't work, according to Yahoo! Beauty. Her doctor also prescribed her an anxiety medication, a pain reliever, and the hormone misoprostol, which softens the cervix to make IUD insertion easier. But when her mom went to Walgreens to fill these three prescriptions, the pharmacist allegedly agreed to fill the first two but said he couldn't give her the misoprostol because of his "personal beliefs," telling her to try another Walgreens.
The pharmacist instructed them to go to another Walgreens and the pair headed to another branch. But the mother (called “Jane Doe” in the complaints to protect her daughter—who is a minor) was understandably still enraged that they had to do this—and went back to face the original pharmacist. From the Albuquerque Journal:
Doe says she turned around and went back to the first Walgreens, confronted an assistant manager and then the pharmacist.
“I told him he was discriminating against me, that he should be ashamed for judging us, that he didn’t know my daughter’s medical history or her complications or conversation with her doctor. That he didn’t know what the medication was for,” she says. “And he just looks at me and says, ‘Oh, I have a pretty good idea.’ ”
Honestly, it doesn’t really matter why Doe’s daughter needed the prescription. She still has a right to the medications chosen to be best for her by a trained medical professional. However, this is particularly egregious—the pharmacist literally profiled the teen and assumed what the drug in question is being used for. Misoprostol is a drug used to induce abortion, but it’s also used to treat stomach ulcers.
Yahoo! Beauty reports that under official Walgreens policy, the pharmacist is allowed to excuse their self from filling the script—but they also have to let another worker on duty complete the transaction there.