In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court backed the Trump administration in gutting Obamacare’s contraceptive coverage mandate. The administration is basically offering any employer the right to deny employees insurance covering contraceptives based on any claimed moral objection, and the court is fine with that.
Originally, churches and religious organizations were exempt from covering birth control, an exemption that was expanded in 2014 for Hobby Lobby to cover “closely held” private companies with religious objections. Now the court has included universities and publicly traded companies in the right to deny workers insurance coverage with which they may get contraceptives.
Sign the petition: The next Democratic administration must rescind Trump’s anti-birth control regulation.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Ginsburg writing that in this decision, “the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree.
“This Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets,” Ginsburg continued. “The Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause, all agree,does not call for that imbalanced result.1 Nor does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42U. S. C. §2000bb et seq., condone harm to third parties occasioned by entire disregard of their needs. I therefore dissent from the Court’s judgment, under which, as the Government estimates, between 70,500 and 126,400 women would immediately lose access to no-cost contraceptive services.”
And the Trump administration celebrates.