U.S. judge sides with anti-abortion group

March for Life can exclude contraceptives from its health plans.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday sided with an anti-abortion group in its challenge of a key birth control provision of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon adds to the legal debate surrounding the law’s requirement that contraceptives for women be included among a range of cost-free, preventive benefifits offered to employees.

The 29-page opinion held that March for Life could be exempt from the requirement, known as the contraceptive mandate, even though it is a non-religious organization that opposes abortion on ethical grounds rather than religious ones.

The organization contends that life begins at conception and opposes coverage in its health insurance plans for methods of contraception that it likens to abortion.

It sued the Obama administration last year, calling the contraceptive mandate unconstitutional because it grants an exemption to churches, synagogues and other religious institutions but does not extend it to non-religious groups that raise ethical — and not religious — objections.

In his ruling, Leon agreed with that reasoning, saying the contracep- tive requirement violated the Constitution by treating religious and nonreligious groups differently.

March for Life closely resembles religious groups in that its employees do not wish to use birth control, Leon wrote, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has nonetheless chosen to “accommodate this moral philosophy only when it is overtly tied to religious values.” The government, he said, has created a framework of “regulatory favoritism.

Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers represented March for Life, said Leon’s decision was the fifirst to side with an organiz ation that opposed the contraceptive mandate on moral rather than religious grounds. Alliance senior legal counsel Matthew Bowman said in Leon had recognized the “irrationality of forcing a prolife organization to provide anti-life items in their health insurance.”

Lawsuits over the contraceptive mandate are part of the lengthy political and legal battle over the health-care law that President Barack Obama signed in 2010. There have been about 100 lawsuits from businesses and religiously affiliated colleges, hospit als and other not-for-profifit organizations challenging the law’s requirement on contraceptives.

Other religiously affiliated groups also do not have to comply, but have to tell the government they object.