The CVS pharmacy chain is facing another lawsuit accusing the company of religious discrimination against one of its former employees.
CBS News reports J. Robyn Strader, a nurse practitioner in Texas, said CVS Health fired her because she refused to fill prescriptions for birth control and abortion-inducing drugs in accordance with her Christian faith.
In the lawsuit, Strader said CVS accommodated her religious beliefs for most of the six and a half years when she worked there. When someone requested a prescription that she objected to, the company allowed her to refer the person to another employee or CVS pharmacy, the lawsuit contends.
“I believe that all human life is created in God’s image and should be protected,” Strader said. “For this reason, I cannot participate in facilitating an abortion or participate in facilitating contraceptive use that could prevent the implantation of an embryo, cause an abortion or contribute to infertility.”
However, in 2021, the lawsuit says the company changed its religious accommodations policy, and Strader was fired a short time later.
Her lawyers said the company did not “engage with her about possible accommodations, and terminated her because of her religious beliefs.”
“CVS’s new policy is to deny all such religious accommodations without considering the particular circumstances of the employee requesting the accommodation, including to determine whether that employee could be accommodated without undue hardship,” according to the lawsuit.
Strader’s lawsuit is the third to accuse CVS of discriminating against Christian employees in the past year, according to CBS News.
In response to a similar lawsuit by a former Virginia employee, CVS spokesman Michael DeAngelis said the company believes “reproductive health” care – a term that typically includes elective abortions – is essential health care, and therefore employees cannot refuse to provide it.
“It is not possible … to grant an accommodation that exempts an employee from performing the essential functions of their job,” DeAngelis said in a statement last year. “We cannot grant exemptions from these essential MinuteClinic functions.”
Since the lawsuits, CVS has announced that it will begin selling abortion drugs that are used to kill unborn babies up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Walgreens plans to do the same.
Their decision comes after the Biden administration decided to allow pharmacies to sell the dangerous abortion drug mifepristone, which has killed millions of babies and dozens of women, and injured thousands more. Previously, mifepristone could only be dispensed by abortion facilities, medical offices and hospitals under the supervision of a licensed physician.
Pro-life leaders are urging Americans to boycott the two companies.
Reporting from Life News.
