String of staff blunders at a pharmacy leads to a mother unwittingly taking the drugs that killed her two babies in utero

One of my biggest gripes about the modern era is the indescribable decline in competency and professionalism—you have to constantly babysit people to do the most mediocre job, and you’re not even getting paid to do it—and nowhere is that more clear and tragic than one Nevada woman’s story.

According to a Monday report by a local outlet in Las Vegas, in 2019 and in a bid to grow their family, Timika Thomas and her husband chose the IVF route, with doctors implanting two embryos into Timika, and sending her home with a prescription to sustain the pregnancy, but after a “series of errors” made by the pharmacy’s staff, Timika’s two babies were gone. From the article:

Thomas went to her CVS branch at W. Craig Road and Camino Al Norte in North Las Vegas. She took two of her required doses and knew something was wrong.

‘I started cramping really bad,’ Thomas said.

No stranger to the IVF process, she expected cramping, but this was not the pain she anticipated.

‘My cramping went beyond that,’ she said. ‘It was extreme. It was painful.’

Thomas checked the bottle, looked up the name of the prescription on the label, and the results of her internet search began a yearslong process of mourning.

‘The first thing I read is it’s used for abortions,’ Thomas said.

‘They just killed my baby,’ she said to herself at the time. ‘Both my babies, because I transferred two embryos.’

The article described the strings of blunders, made by three separate employees, including two pharmacists:

Among the series of mistakes, those documents say one technician – incorrectly believing she knew the generic name for the brand prescribed by the doctor – entered the wrong name into the prescription. One pharmacist did not catch the error, and another pharmacist failed to counsel Thomas when she came to pick up her medication.

CVS apologized to Timika, as well as the two pharmacists—one even broke down in sobs for participating in the death of the babies—but a “sorry” was all she got, which she said “will never be good enough.”

Now, this is not to insinuate that Timika is pro-abortion (I have no idea what her political views are), but her heartbreaking experience reiterates an established truth: sanctioning murder of the innocent, whether culturally or legally, puts everyone at risk, and soon, more than just the undesirables will suffer the same fate. Her story is another example (there have been countless through history) of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem come-to-life—you might recall the speaker is the final of state-sanctioned violence, one who never spoke out before because it wasn’t his head on the chopping block. Eventually, when he was the only one left, he too was killed.

By allowing the practice of abortion to continue, writing it off as a private decision between a woman and her doctor, or thinking that legal-but-restricted is an acceptable compromise, or not caring enough to stand against it, does not contain murderous violence against the innocent to just the unfortunate souls in the womb. It promotes a broad and insidious culture of death, a lesson that the speaker in Niemöller’s poem learned the hard way, and it means that one day, death hits even the “desirables.”

Image: Madcapslaugh and Rizome, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.

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