Healey sues to retain birth control mandate

Bay State Attorney General Maura Healey is suing the Trump administration for rolling back birth control coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act as religious groups hail the administration’s new rules that allow more employers to opt out of providing no-cost birth control.

“The Trump administration’s actions today are a direct attack on women’s health and the right to access affordable and reliable contraception,” Healey said yesterday in a statement. “By gutting this mandate, the religious belief of employers will replace the basic right of a woman to care for herself and her family.”

The new policy was a long-anticipated revision to ACA requirements that most companies cover birth control as preventive care for women at no additional cost. That Obama-era requirement applies to all FDA-approved methods, including the morning-after pill, which some religious conservatives call an abortion drug, though scientists say it has no effect on women who are already pregnant.

In a statement, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said, “The administration’s decision to provide a broad religious and moral exemption to the HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) mandate recognizes that the full range of faith-based and mission-driven organizations, as well as the people who run them, have deeply held religious and moral beliefs that the law must respect.

“Such an exemption is no innovation, but instead a return to common sense, longstanding federal practice, and peaceful coexistence between church and state,” the statement continued. “It corrects an anomalous failure by federal regulators that should never have occurred and should never be repeated.”

But in her complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, Healey argues the new rule is unconstitutional because it allows the federal government to endorse certain religious beliefs over a woman’s right to make choices about her own health care.

This year, the National Women’s Law Center estimated that 62.4 million women have insurance coverage of birth control without outof-pocket costs because of the ACA. Of those women, 1.4 million live in Massachusetts, according to federal statistics. But the new mandate could force thousands of them to turn to Mass-Health — the state’s Medicaid plan — for coverage, which would place a financial burden on the state, Healey said in her complaint.

Dr. Jennifer Childs-Roshak, a family physician and CEO and president of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, said the new mandate is “one of a string of anti-science, anti-women” Trump administration policies and “underscores the urgency to move along” state Senate bill 499, which would protect birth control coverage with no additional costs to the state or private insurers.