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When Julee Lacey, a 32-year-old mother of two in North Richland Hills, Texas, went to fill her birth-control prescription at a CVS store in March, she wasn't trying to set off a firestorm.
But when the pharmacist refused to fill the prescription on moral grounds, the match was lit.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America shot off an angry letter to the head of the Rhode Island drugstore chain. With its plan to acquire more than 1,200 Eckerd stores, CVS will become the largest retail pharmacy in the nation.
The CVS incident was particularly troubling because just two months earlier a pharmacist at an Eckerd in Denton, Texas, had refused to fill a prescription for the "morning-after" emergency contraceptive to a woman identified as a rape victim.
According to a spokesman for the American Pharmacists Association, the trade group recognizes an individual pharmacist's right to exercise "conscientious refusal," but says systems should be in place to ensure patients still get access to legally prescribed drugs.
Eckerd fired the pharmacist who refused to sign off on the morning-after pill. CVS declines to say what action it took against Julee Lacey's pharmacist. But in a written statement, the company said, "We moved quickly to personally deliver the customer's medication to her free of charge and we have apologized to her."
CVS, which called Lacey's experience an isolated occurrence, said it is reviewing its policy to prevent a similar incident in the future.