This is a family-friendly site, otherwise I’m sure the title language should be a lot stronger.
A pharmacy mistakenly gives a pregnant woman the abortion pill instead of her antibiotic.
They’ve issued an apology for the error. I’m sure that’s comforting to the mom.
I know, I know, I’m a crazy pro-lifer. But I’ve always thought that pharmacies should not deliberately keep pills that kill on hand. There used to be something…what was it called again? The Hippocratic Oath.
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Jennifer notices: A pharmacy employee posted in the comments to this article, “That leaves us a skeleton crew of 1-4 people at any one time. These few people have to accept the scripts, fill them, handle insurance problems, call/fax doctors, run a register at the counter, a register at the drive-thru, and much more… ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It is a horrible system and errors are constantly happening…they are just usually caught before the medicine is handed to the patient” I would imagine that the one, most important thing to get right, as a pharmacy employee would be to give the patient the RIGHT prescription. But even in the doctor’s office, I’m often handled with latex gloves (which I’m allergic to, as it states in my chart) and given prescriptions that shouldn’t mix with my thyroid medication.
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I cannot imagine what that poor mother must be going through.
Some news sources (such as http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/09/us-pregnant-drug-idUSTRE7180EH20110209) are reporting the drug was an anti-cancer medication that is also used as an abortion drug. The pharmacy is in incredible fault for handing out the wrong drug to the wrong person, but maybe we should be slower to fault them for having the drug in stock, if it was in fact being used to treat cancer.
This mother is now in a very awful situation. Who knows what the reprocussions of this would be on her child. I imagine there could easily be people around her who would secredly hope that she will miscarry now so she can start again with another pregnancy rather than run the risk of bringing a child with serious health problems into the world. It is such an awful situation she is in, and so horrible that this happened.
Christy, I have to agree with you about the drug being in-stock. When I was listening to the news broadcast, they stated the patient intended to receive the drug was 59. That’s not a typical age for a woman experiencing pregnancy, so I had assumed she was a cancer patient myself. Never-the-less, perhaps there should be additional measures taken to ensure drugs which can have these types of “side effects” are not say sitting on the same shelf as other drugs?