Conscience and Professions

One other difference between the doctors' refusal to participate in the death penalty and pharmacists refusing to sell contraception that I should have noted yesterday:  in one case, doctors are being asked to directly cooperate in the killing of a human being; in the other case, they are being asked to sell someone something that is not even considered evil in itself (oral contraceptives are, as I recall, permitted by the Church for therapeutic purposes).  Despite some efforts to compare contraception to homicide (Grisez compares it variously to homicide, suicide and abortion), I don't find the analogy all that compelling, and I suppose it seems obvious to me that the infringement on individual conscience of requiring someone to directly participate in taking a person's life is substantially more serious than that involved in requiring them to sell a medical treatment to someone when the particular use  to which the customer would likely put the medicine (though not the medicine itself) offends the conscience of the pharmacist.  Just to be clear, this is not to say that I think the pharmacist should be compelled to sell contraception (though I think a case could be made for certain pharmacists in remote locations who have what amounts to a monopoly).  I just think the two cases are different in significant ways.