The Trump administration’s religious and moral carve-outs to an ObamaCare requirement that all employer health plans cover contraception at no cost were blocked on Wednesday by a federal judge.
District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a summary judgment that the rules were arbitrary, capricious and an overreach of the authority of the agencies that wrote them in 2017.
Under the rules, essentially any for-profit or nonprofit employer or insurer was allowed to exempt themselves from following the birth control mandate on moral and religious grounds. The rules also let publicly traded companies obtain a religious exemption, but not a moral one.
The Affordable Care Act required employer health plans to cover at least one of 18 forms of birth control approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Religious groups and employers sued, and the Supreme Court in 2014 ruled 5-4 that the contraceptive mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) rights of closely held corporations whose owners had religious objections.
Subsequent agency actions tried to find a balance, but the Trump administration in 2017 issued a blanket exemption. The rules didn’t require employers to apply for an exemption because the administration said that would be a violation of their religious rights.
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and dozens of other states sued to halt that broad expansion of exemptions and accommodations. That lawsuit reached the Supreme Court in 2020, where the justices upheld the Trump rules on technical grounds but did not address the underlying merits of the case.
The case was sent back to the lower court, where a religious group, Little Sisters of the Poor, joined the lawsuit alongside the federal government in asking for summary judgment.
Beetlestone, an appointee of former President Obama, wrote that the Trump administration’s religious rule did not accomplish what the agencies purportedly wrote it to do, which was to resolve a conflict between the contraceptive mandate and RFRA.
But the rule exemptions to organizations that are “unlikely, if ever, to be capable of maintaining a religious objection, raising further doubts as to any ‘rational connection’ between the Rule and remedying potential conflicts with RFRA,” Beetlestone wrote.
The Little Sisters of the Poor will appeal the ruling in the coming weeks, according to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit that represents the order.
