Don’t harm women’s health Gretchen Borchelt

The Obama administration has gone out of its way to accommodate the religious beliefs of employers who don’t want to provide insurance coverage for birth control required by the Affordable Care Act.

There is an outright exemption for churches and other houses of worship. Religiously affiliated non-profit organizations can opt out, too. They simply fill out a form stating their objection and send it to their insurance company or the government. Then, the insurance company must provide the non-profits’ employees with the coverage directly, without the employers’ involvement. These employers are exempted, but the women get the essential birth control coverage they need.

The employers who brought the challenge heard at the Supreme Court on Wednesday object to this opt-out process, claiming that filling out the form violates their religious beliefs. This is an extreme argument that stretches religious liberty principles beyond belief. Eight of nine federal appellate courts that considered these claims rejected them soundly, including the cases now before the Supreme Court.

If the court follows its own logic in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, it will reject these claims. In that case, involving certain for-profit companies that did not qualify for the exemption or opt-out, the court identified the opt-out process as a solution.

The court said the opt-out process “seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious non-profit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage.”

But if these non-profits have their way, thousands of women will be denied contraceptive coverage. This would separate birth control from women’s other basic health needs, and force women to climb barriers, some insurmountable, to get birth control.

That would undo the significant benefits women have gained from the birth control coverage requirement — and harm their health, equality and economic security.