On Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allows employers to opt-out of birth control coverage due to religious or moral objections.
What We Know:
- The Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 decision that lets employers with religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act, could result in as many as 126,000 women losing contraceptive coverage from their employers.
- The regulation was the latest attempt to undermine the “contraception mandate,” a signature initiative of the Obama administration that required most employers to provide cost-free coverage for contraception.
- Two other decisions were made by the Supreme Court in the last week which examines the relationship between church and state. Also on Wednesday, the court ruled by another 7-to-2 vote that employment discrimination laws did not apply to teachers in religious schools. Last week, by a 5-to-4 vote, it said state programs that provide scholarships to students in private schools may not exclude religious schools.
- Many religious groups praised the contraception decision. “The government has no business forcing pro-life and religious organizations to provide drugs and devices that can destroy life,” John Bursch, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement.
- The decision also faced a lot of criticism from individuals and organizations seeking to protect access to birth control and abortion. Many denounced the ruling as an assault on women that, as NARAL Pro-Choice America said on Twitter, “gave the Trump administration a green light to attack our birth control coverage. It’s clear that they’ll stop at nothing to take away our reproductive freedom.”
- Many critics also questioned the inequality between providing free access of Viagra to men through insurance but revoking a woman’s access to birth control which provides many other benefits to women besides basic contraception.
In this country Viagra is covered by insurance without question, but birth control coverage is dependent upon the religious ideals of employers/institutions.
If that sounds:
– misogynistic
– discriminatory
– irresponsible
– indicative of systemic sexism
that’s because it is!— Padma Lakshmi (@PadmaLakshmi) July 8, 2020
Wondering if there’s a reason that employers object to providing birth control but not Viagra? Asking for more than half of the population. 🤔 https://t.co/IR1pMshPpv
— Katie Porter (@katieporteroc) July 9, 2020
- For opponents of the regulation, the decision to uphold it was especially disappointing because two members of the court’s liberal wing, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, voted with the majority.
- In a joint opinion written by Kagan, they said that the Affordable Care Act itself authorized “regulators to create exemptions for employers with religious objections”, noting that the Obama administration had adopted one limited to houses of worship. Whether the Trump administration had provided adequate justifications for its much broader exemption, Kagan wrote, was a question for another day.
- In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority had given religious belief too much power. “Today, for the first time, the court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree,” she wrote. “Ready access to contraceptives and other preventive measures for which Congress set the stage, both safeguards women’s health and enables women to chart their own life’s course.”
- The Supreme Court challenge came after Pennsylvania and New Jersey had successfully halted implementation of the regulations in the lower courts. The states argued that the federal government failed to follow the legal protocol known as notice-and-comment in creating the rules. The states said that if the rules went into effect, they would shoulder most of the cost of costs to run their taxpayer-funded family-planning programs.
- The decision sent the cases of Pennsylvania and New Jersey back to the lower courts.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement that “this fight is not over”. ″Our case was never about requiring religious groups to provide contraception,” Shapiro said. “Our case is about an overly broad rule that allows the personal beliefs of CEOs to dictate women’s guaranteed access to contraceptive medicine.”
