WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on
Wednesday upheld a Trump administration regulation that lets employers with
religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage
under the Affordable Care Act and could result in as many as 126,000 women
losing the contraceptive coverage from their employers.
The 7-to-2 decision was the latest turn
in seven years of fierce litigation over the “contraception mandate,” a
signature initiative of the Obama administration that required most employers
to provide cost-free coverage for contraception and that the Trump
administration has sought to limit.
I a second maser dissection on
religious rights on Wednesday, the court ruled by another 7-to-2 vote that
employment discrimination laws did not apply to teachers in religious schools.
Last week, by a 5-to-4 vote, it said state programs that provide scholarships
to students in private schools may no execlute religious school.
The
three decisions were part of a broad examination of the relationship between
church and state over the 15-year tenure of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
in which the court’s conservative majority has almost always sided with
religious groups.
Many religious of groups praised the
contraception decision. “The government has no business forcing pro-life and
religious organizations to provide drugs and devices that can destroy life,”
John Bursch, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement.
Organizations seeking to the protect access to birth control and abortion
denounced the ruling as an assault on women that, as NARAL Pro-Choice America “gave the Trump administration a green light to
attack our birth control coverage.”
The clash between contraceptive
coverage and claims of conscience is a key battleground in the culture wars,
and the Supreme Court’s decision is likely to mobilize voters on both sides of
the divide.
For opponents of the regulation, the
decision to uphold it was especially disappointing because two members of the
court’s liberal wing, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, voted with
the majority.
Both
justices had been in dissent in 2014, when the
court ruled in
a 5-to-4 decision that requiring family-owned corporations to provide
contraceptive coverage violated a federal law protecting religious freedom.
On Wednesday, in a concurring opinion
written by Justice Kagan, they said that the Affordable Care Act itself
authorized regulators to create exemptions for employers with religious
objections, noting that the Obama administration had adopted one limited to
houses of worship. Whether the Trump administration had provided adequate
justifications for its much broader exemption, Justice Kagan wrote, was a
question for another day.
“Even in an area of broad statutory
authority — maybe especially there — agencies must rationally account for their
judgments,” she wrote. The court returned the case to the appeals court for
consideration of other challenges to the regulation.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for
the five more conservative members of the court, agreed that the Affordable
Care Act had authorized regulators “to provide exemptions from the regulatory
contraceptive requirements for employers with religious and conscientious
objections.” But, unlike Justice Kagan, he did not suggest that the regulation
remained vulnerable to a new legal challenge.
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority had given
religious belief too much power.
“In accommodating claims of religious
freedom, this court has taken a balanced approach, one that does not allow the
religious beliefs of some to overwhelm the rights and interests of others who
do not share those beliefs,” she wrote. “Today, for the first time, the court
casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure
religious rights to the nth degree.”
Justice Ginsburg added that the ruling
would have vast practical consequences, forcing poorer women to forgo
contraception or use less effective methods.
The Obama and Trump administrations
have taken very different approaches to contraceptive coverage.
In
March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the
afforda ble care 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. The regulations exempted houses of worship — including
churches, temples and mosques — from the contraception requirement. But
nonprofit groups like schools and hospitals affiliated with religious
organizations were covered.
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 scientific matter.