Nice to see O'Bama working on getting rid of midnight Bush rules

[Lissa]

Then, the court would be the correct place to resolve the issue. These are the types of situations that need adjudication. If the person who refused to sell the product was an employee of the pharmacy, then the pharmacy as a business would bear the loss for hiring this person who has moral objections. Just as it would be for a trucking company to hire a trucker who refuses to haul toxic waste.

Wrong. When you become an employee you agree to follow the rules and regulations of the business you are a part of. If that business says that you must do something that you find objectionable, you should either quit or recognize that you will be removed for someone that will perform what the business asks you to do. In this case the business had the materials to provide, but the pharmacist choose not to supply them even though they were obligated by the contract they signed when they joined the company to perform what the company tasked of them. Then to take it further and berate the victim and cause her additional mental trauma because the pharmacist in question found the use of the drug morally objectionable and almost caused the victim to commit suicide (and the only reason she didn't was due to the intervention of the friend that was with her) shows gross negligence on the part of the pharmacist. Rightfully the Pharmacy fired the pharmacist after the incident for not fulfilling his obligations as an employee.

Then no one who has a conscience will be a medical practitioner. You will always find a limit beyond which most people will not go, and this is doubly true in medicine. The duty of medicine is not to "improve the quality of life", it is to heal.

I know some medical practioneers that would scoff at your comment. There are things that you cannot heal, but you can improve the patient's quality of life. The goal of medicine is treat the sick and injured and improve their quality of life, if that means healing then that is part of it, but if the person has a terminal disease of which there is no cure and no healing that can be done, but the patient can be made more comfortable, then that is goal the practitioneer.

According to a recent (Jan 2008) Washington Post-ABC News Poll - question 25 - 21% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all cases, and 15% believe abortion should be illegal in all cases. So in this case, extreme fringe means 15% of the sample. In that poll, 57% believe that abortion should be mostly available, and 40% believe it should be mostly unavailable. The poll also needs to be understood within its sampling of (e.g. 39% Democrats, 27% Republicans, and 29% independent). Also, I'm not presenting a stand on the issue, only reflecting what most opinion polls are showing.

Would it be ethical to kill or sell our young children because it would improve the quality of our lives? That is the justification for the majority of abortion procedures, with the only difference being postpartum. Most abortions are an economic choice, rather than one of morality or ethics. I don't think the life raft is a straw man argument. If you needed to lose one person and had 6 useful people (for the survival of the 7) in the raft, and an unnecessary mother with an infant, would you choose to toss one or both of them overboard?

And without the information on what should be mostly available and what should not be mostly available, your poll is useless. I would bet that if you looked more deeply into that poll, you would find that should not be mostly available would show that in the case of rape, incest, or the survival of the mother, the 40% that said should not mostly be available would say it should be availlable. But again, without the actual information from the poll, your poll is meaningless. On the other hand, listing to the majority of conservatives out there, a large number say as I have said, in the case of rape, incest, or the life of the mother, abortion should be allowed.