Start looking for other ways to ensure Plan B access

It’s time for a plan B for Plan B.

Federal Judge Ron Leighton Thursday suspended the state’s requirement that all pharmacists must fill valid prescriptions for legal drugs, including the “morning-after” birth control pills.

He ruled pharmacists and a drugstore owner who are challenging the rule as a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion are likely to prevail in court.

Access to Plan B is important — so important that Gov. Chris Gregoire last year threatened to oust any member of the state pharmacy board who approved a rule allowing druggists to refuse to dispense Plan B or any other legal drug on moral grounds.

Months of negotiations produced the rule now in jeopardy. It provides a limited conscience clause: A pharmacist can refuse to dispense a drug, but only if there is another pharmacist on hand willing to step in.

With that rule on hold while the judge hears the case — and eventually decides if the requirement is indeed unconstitutional — the state would do well to plot a pragmatic response.

Ensuring that patients, especially those in rural areas, don’t have to traipse from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find the drugs they need remains a good public policy. So does providing ready access to a contraceptive that can reduce unwanted pregnancies and abortions if a woman can get it within 72 hours of having unprotected sex.

State lawmakers and regulators should be thinking about how to accomplish those aims short of forcing pharmacists to dispense drugs. Posting a registry of drugstores that stock Plan B and other potentially controversial drugs on the Internet is just one idea. Then patients don’t have to waste valuable time or fear a druggist’s reproach.

Such a registry would also allow the state to identify where Plan B is hard to come by so that it can develop alternative ways of getting the contraceptive to the community.

That’s a much better approach than trying to reassert the state rules as some state lawmakers are threatening. While the state’s lawyers argue that Washington’s pharmacist rules do not violate the free exercise clause, at least one federal judge seems inclined to disagree.

The First Amendment is no legal technicality easily tossed aside. Plan B supporters are making a major mistake if they don’t face up to the possibility that the pharmacy rule might not survive its constitutional test.