Walgreens pharmacist denies pregnant woman miscarriage medication over his ethical beliefs

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Nicole Arteaga was looking forward to the birth of her second child.

Already a mom to a 7-year-old son, Arteaga, 35, was nine weeks pregnant when her doctor delivered the worst news she could hear. Her unborn baby had stopped growing and had no fetal heartbeat.

She would have a miscarriage.

The doctor gave Arteaga three options: undergo a medical procedure to remove the lifeless fetus, wait for nature to take its course or take prescription medication to help her body let go of the deceased unborn baby.

After a day of thinking, she opted to take the medication. The drug, Misoprostol, causes a woman’s uterus to contract and allows the fetus to come out.

Arteaga, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, received an email Wednesday evening, saying her Misoprostol was ready for pickup at her local Walgreens. But, when she went to pick it up Thursday night, the pharmacist on duty refused to give her the drug.

She stood, humiliated, as the pharmacist said he would not give her the prescription because of his own ethical beliefs. Her 7-year-old son and a group of other customers were all listening.

“He had it in his hand and refrained from giving it to me,“ Arteaga explained. ”…I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

Arteaga said she left Walgreens in tears.

“Having a miscarriage and having to deal with this is like a double dose of terribleness,” she said.

The pharmacist arranged for her to pick up the Misoprostol the next day at another Walgreens located 20-minutes away.

James W. Graham, senior manager of media relations for the pharmacy chain, confirmed what happened and issued a statement on behalf of Walgreens.

“After learning what happened, we reached out to the patient and apologized for how the situation was handled. To respect the sincerely held beliefs of our pharmacists while at the same time meeting the needs of our patients, our policy allows pharmacists to step away from filling a prescription for which they have a moral objection. At the same time, they are also required to refer the prescription to another pharmacist or manager on duty to meet the patient’s needs in a timely manner. We are looking into the matter to ensure that our patients’ needs are handled properly.”

But, Arteaga said the corporate statement wasn’t entirely true. According to her, Walgreens didn’t reach out to her. Arteaga said she reached out to them.

And, if the policy calls for another pharmacist or manager on duty to help in a situation like hers, Arteaga said there were other workers available who should have processed the transaction. According to her, there were two other employees in the pharmacy at the time – both of whom were assisting other customers. And, even if they refused too, she said there was surely a manager at the store to help.

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christel-thoughts:

newtothisforgiveme:

futureblackwakandan:

bi-not-gay-bae:

broolynn:

bi-not-gay-bae:

broolynn:

SAY IT LOUDER || Source- https://twitter.com/ivieani/status/1008769531584679936?s=19

That’s what you got from “This is America”?????

@bi-not-gay-bae in the tweet it says “diatribes against america” lol what did we not get?

@broolynn The way it was written was to make what Donald did seem not as important as what Janelle did. As if people are only crediting him because he’s a man. Let’s stop, nothing Janelle has done was at that level of “This Is America” & actually this goes for a lot of other artists. Why compare those two very different artists?? Granted I don’t know a ton about all her music she’s obviously a talented dancer probably the best female dancer of our generation, her music speaks to a specific audience & those familiar with funk, & Jidenna is her artist but this is a reach.

“nothing Janelle has done was at that level of This Is America”

“Granted I don’t know a ton about all her music”

🤔🤔🤔

Don’t you love when they argue just to make the original point?

billnihilism:

also I have had straight female friends, totally divorced from any kind of queer culture at all, literally describe dysphoria to me without having the language or framework to name it. a straight friend and I once agreed in high school- when I wasn’t even calling myself a lesbian let alone understanding dysphoric feelings!- that our lives would be so much better and our happiness so much more achievable if we were just sexless, no breasts, no hips, no genitals. illegible and unknowable. it’s not that all of us are Non Women, it’s that womanhood is by its nature traumatic and alienating. why would your gender feel coherent with your body when your body is literally not yours, by definition

timetosavetheuniverse:

blueannawriting:

wlwsharoncarter:

wlwsharoncarter:

my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.

CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW

Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons

most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs

one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no ~~you didn’t go to med school and I did~~ and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while

but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.

when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”

and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name

I’ve been deliberately requesting only female doctors throughout my entire transition cause I am not interested in death

foshriizzle:

residentgoodgirl:

residentgoodgirl:

I think one of my least favorite types of responses to people speaking up on sexual harassment and sexual assault is are articles like “in wake of weinstein, men wonder if hugging women still ok”, and comments like “this is why men don’t pursue women anymore”, “i don’t wanna work with women cause i don’t want a lawsuit”, or “i don’t even look at women anymore cause everything is sexual harassment”. this is a particular brand of rape culture, men acting as if women are overreacting, as if men don’t have the basic social skills to know the difference between wanted and unwanted advances, as if women simply setting boundaries is “cramping their style” and “emasculating” them, as if the rules of respecting women are super confusing, so confusing that they’re supposedly forcing men not to interact with us altogether.

this is an act they’ve been putting on for decades: playing stupid, pretending not to know better and then getting upset when we tell them what “better” is. if that doesn’t show you how emotional and emotionally manipulative they are, i don’t know what does.

so i was reading this: The myth of the male bumbler by Lili Loofbourow

“There’s a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler’s perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture’s most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.”

murderxbaby:

notanadult:

amuseoffyre:

aggrokawaii:

justsomeantifas:

my-username-is-classified:

justsomeantifas:

call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.

@ everyone in the notes talking about physical performance: if that were the case, then sports would be divided by physical performance. that’s a thing you can measure. that’s a thing that varies by individual. a weak man and a strong man would be an unfair fight in boxing/wrestling/MMA, which is why they divide those sports up into weight groups based on physical performance. but they also further segregate them based on gender. chess is segregated by gender for no reason but sexism. if it’s actually about skill and physical ability, then measure those and separate people by those metrics. don’t do some bullshit gender segregation and pretend like men and women are inherently on different levels no matter their individual abilities.

💅

Remember that time a teenage girl struck out Babe Ruth? That’s fucking why. Men are afraid of being beaten by women.

Remember that time male swimmers were pulled out of training because Kate Ledecky was leaving them ‘broken’ by swimming better than them? Remember how she didn’t even notice, because she was busy actually training?

Shooting is a sport that has no reliance on strength and so any allowance for gender variation is irrelevant.

The last time there was a mixed competition (1992) a chinese woman named Zhang Shan won it.

It’s often presented as for the benefit of women. After all, they’ll be heartbroken when they‘re hurt or bested by men.

Projection is a hell of a drug.