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One month after filing our objections in court to the Trump administration’s leaked draft rule that would gut the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most health insurance plans cover contraceptives, we repeated our warning: Women, including the students we represent, would be seriously harmed by the new regulations. Under the draft Trump rule, any employer or university, even for-profit corporations, could use religion as an excuse to completely deny their employees and students contraceptive coverage.
Decisions about women’s health should be left to women—not to their employers or universities. Stripping coverage for birth control, which is essential to women’s healthcare, is nothing more than discrimination.
Religious freedom guarantees us the right to believe—or not to believe—as we see fit. , Religious freedom does not give employers or universities an excuse to insert themselves into the private healthcare decisions of their employees and students. Discrimination disguised as “religious freedom” is still discrimination.
We’ve already been fighting in court to ensure that religion isn’t used as an excuse to deny access to birth control. We filed friend-of-the-court briefs in multiple cases that challenged the ACA’s requirement to cover birth control. And in University of Notre Dame v. Price, we told the court again today that under this draft rule, the students we represent would lose their insurance coverage for contraception. We will continue to fight to make sure these students and all women like them have affordable, seamless access to contraception. Women’s health and equality and religious freedom are at stake.
Stay tuned—we’ll keep you posted on what happens with Trump’s proposal, our fight for the students, and all our work to stop those who want to use religion as an excuse to harm others.