For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort
Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March,
the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe
in birth control.

"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription
until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to
regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was
ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill
prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington
have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that
allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in
procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already
had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten
other states considered similar bills this year.

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy
that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral
grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills.
Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist
to fill.