A coalition of attorneys general from five states have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to keep the Trump regime from imposing its new rule allowing employers to discriminate on religious or moral grounds against women by denying them birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act. One of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, said this healthcare decision shouldn’t be up to employers:
“If a woman can’t control her own body, she isn’t truly free,” Schneiderman said. “Healthcare decisions should be made by a woman – not her boss. These retrograde rules seek to deny basic healthcare to millions of women in New York and across the country. We’ll continue to fight back and protect New Yorkers.”
The five states—California, New York, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia—filed the motion Thursday night with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It’s part of a lawsuit originally filed by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in mid-October.
Previously, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Hobby Lobby, only houses of worship, religious non-profits and some private companies having few shareholders could get away with not providing birth control coverage to their workers by getting an “accommodation” to have health insurers rather than the employer pay for contraception
Now, those employers can go a step further in restricting birth control coverage by seeking an all-out exemption — which means women in those workplaces, and their dependents, will no longer have contraceptive coverage at all, said Laurie Sobel, associate director for women’s health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
The new rule also allows publicly traded companies and all nonprofits and universities to take a religious exemption.
The lawsuit calls the new rule unconstitutional on the grounds that it targets women by denying them equal protection under the law and lets employers discriminate based on religious beliefs. It also challenges the rule makers for violating the federal Administrative Procedure Act by not having been transparent about the process used in changing the policy.
This religious interference in secular matters is focused entirely on controlling women’s behavior and meddling in their most personal decisions. So much for the party of “family values.”