Court to decide if employers must offer birth control

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether the Trump administration may allow employers to limit women’s access to free birth control under the Affordable Care Act.

The case returns the court to a key battle-groundin the culture wars, but one in which successive administrations have switched sides.

In the Obama years, the court heard two cases on whether religious groups could refuse to comply with regulations requiring contraceptive coverage. The new case presents the opposite question: Can the Trump administration allow all sorts of employers with religious or moral objections to contraception to opt out of the coverage requirement?

Brigitte Amiri, a lawyer with the American Civil Lib- erties Union’s Reproduc- tive Freedom Project, said the Trump administration’s approach was unlawful.

“Allowing employers and universities to use their reli- gious beliefs to block employees’ and students’ birth-control coverage isn’t religious liberty — it’s discrimina- tion,” she said in a state- ment. “The Trump administration’s attempt to take away people’s insurance coverage for contraception is one of the administration’s many attacks on access to abor- tion and contraception.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abor- tion group, said by way of example that the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns who had intervened in the case, should not be forced to provide coverage at odds with its members’ faith.

“The Little Sisters of the Poor simply want to carry out their mission of love for the elderly, peaceably and in accordance with their deeply-held beliefs,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “Instead they have been threatened with crushing fines and repeatedly dragged to court to defend themselves. President Trump took strong steps to put this nonsense to an end and his administration’s rule should be upheld.”

In March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, which includes a section that requires coverage of preventive health services and screenings for women. The next year, the Obama administration required employers and insurers to provide women with coverage at no cost for all methods of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Houses of worship, including churches, temples and mosques, were exempt from the requirement. But nonprofit groups like schools and hospitals affiliated with religious organizations were not.

Some of those groups objected to providing coverage for any of the approved forms of contraception. Others objected to contraception they said was tantamount to abortion, though there are substantial questions-about whether that characterization was correct as a matter of science.

The Trump administration took the side of the religious employers, saying that requiring contraception coverage can impose a “substantial burden” on the exercise of religion.