In February 2023, The Satanic Temple (TST) opened a telehealth clinic that offers free screening, virtual appointments, and medication abortion prescriptions by mail for pregnant women seeking an abortion. Currently, TST offers the services only to patients in New Mexico, but it plans to expand into other states.
Over the past several years, TST has filed lawsuits in multiple states, including Texas, Indiana, and Idaho, directly challenging those state laws that restrict abortion. TST is an IRS-recognized religion that denies the authority of God and describes its mission using seemingly benevolent and unassuming terms. TST alleges that abortion restrictions in certain states interfere with the ability to obtain a medication abortion and argues that abortion is a protected religious right.
Is there any merit to this argument? This is a complex legal area involving telehealth, abortion laws, and determining what actions fall under religious freedoms.
Last week, a federal judge in Texas dealt a blow to the Affordable Care Act’s preventative care requirements that private insurers cover services such as behavioral counseling, HPV vaccination, and pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV/AIDS (PrEP). In Braidwood Management Inc. v. Becerra, Judge Reed O’Connor enjoined the enforcement of the preventative care coverage mandate.
Led by Braidwood Management Inc., the plaintiffs claimed that the preventive services requirements were unconstitutional, violating the Appointments Clause and the Nondelegation Doctrine. Further, they argued that requiring coverage of PrEP violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
In August 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) put in place requirements for service members to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Litigation has since ensued over the military branches’ restrictive approach to religious exemptions to vaccination.
On March 25, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed into one such case: the Court granted the government’s request for a partial stay to allow the Navy to continue to use vaccination status in making deployment and assignment decisions while the litigation proceeds.
Within the coming months, the constitutional right to abortion, which has been in place for nearly 50 years, is likely to be overturned.
In this light, it is more crucial than ever that women have unfettered access to contraception at no charge. Accordingly, the Biden Administration should act now to return the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) contraceptive coverage mandate to its status originally intended by Congress in 2010.
The Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration need not wait for the Supreme Court to determine the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in California v. Texas; they can take charge of the case today by enacting and signing into law overriding legislation.
Since the threat to the ACA is based on the interpretation of a federal statute — the ACA’s “inseverability clause” — Congress is within its rights to take charge of the case. Why? Because courts are not the final word on the meaning of a statute, Congress is.
Assuming that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) withstands its most recent challenge in California v. Texas, the Biden administration should prioritize as a future reform the codification of clearer nondiscrimination standards.
The ACA’s Section 1557, which provides anti-discrimination protections, has been fraught with challenges. Section 1557 incorporates nondiscrimination protections from four separate civil rights statutes. This vague language allows administrations to offer widely differing interpretations of healthcare anti-discrimination protections.
In a 2016 rule, the Obama administration interpreted Section 1557 broadly, including protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as specific language access requirements. Many of these protections were eliminated in a 2020 rule promulgated by the Trump administration.
It’s time to end these fluctuating standards. The Biden administration should work with Congress to add clearer nondiscrimination protections to the ACA.
In her latest column, Linda Greenhouse predicts that the Supreme Court’s order in Zubik v. Burwell will not produce the desired happy compromise between the government and the religious organizations who object to the government’s arranging for their students and staff to receive contraceptive coverage from third parties. Towards the end, Greenhouse also describes how the objectors have inaccurately insisted that these cases are about nuns and only nuns—ignoring the dozens of other plaintiffs whose students and staff number in the tens of thousands—and how legal commentators (some of whom should know better) have gone along:
[T]here is a widespread misunderstanding that the case is about nuns, specifically the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order whose mission is to run nursing homes for the elderly poor. Commentary following last week’s decision perpetuated this misunderstanding. “Surely the Obama administration could find a way to provide contraception to women without involving a group of Catholic nuns,” Ramesh Ponneru, a senior editor of National Review, wrote in a Bloomberg News post titled “The Culture War Obama Didn’t Have to Wage.” Richard W. Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote on Scotusblog that the Obama administration had “aggressively and unlawfully overreached” in its “strange insistence that a community of nuns who take vows of poverty and care for the elderly poor must serve as a vehicle for delivering free contraception to their employees.” In a Wall Street Journal column titled “Big Win for Little Sisters,” William McGurn wrote that “though it was more a TKO than a straight-up ruling, the Little Sisters prevailed at the Supreme Court Monday in their fight against the Obamacare contraceptive mandate.”
This single-minded focus on Little Sisters of the Poor—which itself employs hundreds of people of different religious faiths in multiple states—overlooked the tens of thousands of women who will lose contraceptive coverage if the objectors prevail:
By my count, the Little Sisters of the Poor (who, as I’ve noted before, advertise themselves as equal-opportunity employers in the nursing home enterprise) are only one of 30 petitioners in the seven Supreme Court cases. The other 29 include Catholic and Baptist colleges, Catholic high schools, individual bishops, two chapters of Catholic Charities, other charities, and several individuals.
If anything, there are more objectors and more affected women than even Greenhouse suggests.
In a unanimous, unsigned order hailed as “an almost hilariously brazen punt,” the Supreme Court sent Zubik v. Burwell and the other contraception cases back to the lower courts for further consideration. The order states that, in light of the supplemental briefs submitted at the Court’s request, the parties should have “an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans ‘receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.’”
That, of course, describes the current accommodation, which the Court in 2014 touted as a compromise that protected women’s interests while relieving religious objectors’ of any burdens created by the previous requirement that they provide and pay for the coverage themselves. But the Court, likely split 4–4 on whether even that accommodation complies with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, wants the parties to see if they can compromise further without subjecting women to second-class care.
These cases will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court, which may or may not have nine members by that time. But in the meantime, things are up in the air—especially for affected women:
1. The Court decided—nothing. Although objectors’ lawyers claimed victory, even the most nimble of advocates would struggle to identify an actual victory from an order that “expresses no view on the merits of the cases.” Lest any misunderstanding persist, the Court reiterated that it took no position on any of the underlying legal questions:
In particular, the court does not decide [1] whether petitioners’ religious exercise has been substantially burdened, [2] whether the Government has a compelling interest, or [3] whether the current regulations are the least restrictive means of serving that interest.
Those questions will be decided again by the Courts of Appeals, all but one of which has already ruled against the objectors. A victory this is not.
The first set of supplemental briefs in Zubik v. Burwell is in. The government seems willing to accept a modified version of the Court’s proposed compromise—if it means that the Court will halt the neverending legal challenges to the contraceptive-coverage regulations. The religious objectors, however, merely purport to accept the Court’s proposal; in practice, they are standing by their insistance that affected women should be forced to seek and obtain second-class, contraception-only policies that will sever their reproductive care from the rest of their healthcare. And they reserve the right to use the political process to oppose the creation of even those second-class plans.
Recall that the Court proposed a modified version of the government’s accommodation. The Court proposed that rather than provide separate written notice in order to become exempt from the coverage regulations, objectors coud simply “inform their insurance company that they do not want their health plan to include contraceptive coverage of the type to which they object on religious grounds”; at that point, and as contemplated by the existing accommodation, the insurance companies “would separately notify petitioners’ employees that the insurance company will provide cost-free contraceptive coverage, and that such coverage is not paid for by petitioners and is not provided through petitioners’ health plan.” (If you want more detail, here’s my earlier coverage of the Court’s order.) Read More
This afternoon the Supreme Court requested supplemental briefing in Zubik v. Burwell and the other challenges to the contraceptive-coverage accommodation, as follows: “The parties are directed to file supplemental briefs that address whether and how contraceptive coverage may be obtained by petitioners’ employees through petitioners’ insurance companies, but in a way that does not require any involvement of petitioners beyond their own decision to provide health insurance without contraceptive coverage to their employees.”
And in so doing, the Court offered a proposal of its own (I’ve added paragraph breaks and numbering):
[1] For example, the parties should consider a situation in which petitioners would contract to provide health insurance for their employees, and in the course of obtaining such insurance, inform their insurance company that they do not want their health plan to include contraceptive coverage of the type to which they object on religious grounds.
[2] Petitioners would have no legal obligation to provide such contraceptive coverage, would not pay for such coverage, and would not be required to submit any separate notice to their insurer, to the Federal Government, or to their employees.
[3] At the same time, petitioners’ insurance company—aware that petitioners are not providing certain contraceptive coverage on religious grounds—would separately notify petitioners’ employees that the insurance company will provide cost-free contraceptive coverage, and that such coverage is not paid for by petitioners and is not provided through petitioners’ health plan.
Although it’s foolish to read tea leaves, read them I shall:
1. I think that this is a decent sign for the government. It was clear from last week’s argument that four Justices would vote to uphold the accommodation; but the potential fifth vote, Justice Kennedy, seemed to be skeptical of the government’s arguments. This order suggests that at least five Justices (including Justice Kennedy) seem to think that the challengers’ proposed alternatives to the accommodation (create separate, contraceptive-only policies and require women to seek them out; expand Title X clinics; and other Rube Goldberg-schemes) harm women by preventing them from receiving seamless and convenient coverage. If the Court thought that those other alternatives were sufficient, then it wouldn’t be looking for a way to ensure that women retained accommodation-style seamless coverage.
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