CV NEWS FEED // A federal court in Louisiana on Monday ruled that an agency of the Biden administration cannot force the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other Catholic organizations to pay for their employees’ abortions.
The Biden administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sought to use its interpretation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) to mandate that Catholic employers cover abortions, contrary to their religious beliefs.
The order from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled that the “EEOC has exceeded its statutory authority to implement the PWFA.”
“[I]n doing so, [the EEOC] both unlawfully expropriated the authority of Congress and encroached upon the sovereignty of the [plaintiffs],” the court order stated.
Becket Law, the law firm that represented the plaintiffs, noted that the “ruling protects the [USCCB] and several other Catholic ministries from the [abortion-accomodation] mandate while the case is ongoing.”
“The states of Louisiana and Mississippi had filed a parallel lawsuit before the same court, and employers in those states were also protected by the ruling,” Becket indicated. “The federal government has 60 days to appeal the decision.”
>> APRIL: BIDEN ADMIN TO IMPOSE NEW PRO-ABORTION RULE ON EMPLOYERS <<
Becket counsel Laura Wolk Slavis stated: “The EEOC twisted a law protecting expecting mothers and their babies and co-opted the workplaces of over 130 million Americans to support abortion.”
“That is an abuse of power,” Wolk Slavis emphasized. “[N]o one should have to choose between their conscience and protecting pregnant women. Banning employers nationwide from affirming life is unacceptable and unlawful.”
She went on the call the ruling “an important step in ensuring that American workplaces can be free to continue serving their communities consistent with their beliefs.”
Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson praised the court order on X (formerly Twitter), congratulating both Becket and the USCCB.
In mid-April, CatholicVote reported that the EEOC filed an over-400-page rule on the “implementation” of the PWFA.
Again from CatholicVote:
According to the rule’s summary, it will require “a covered entity to provide reasonable accommodations to a qualified employee’s or applicant’s known limitations related to, affected by, or arising out of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation will cause an undue hardship on the operation of the business of the covered entity.”
The lengthy rule mentions the word “abortion” a total of 348 times.
>> NOVEMBER 2022: RED FLAGS RAISED BY THE PWFA <<
The PWFA is a bipartisan piece of legislation passed by Congress (then under complete Democratic control) and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022.
In November of that year, shortly before the Senate passed the PWFA, CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern wrote that the “legislation offers necessary protections for working mothers” but “could also be used to force employers to pay for abortion-related expenses.”
Ahern explained:
The bill is stand-alone legislation that deliberately fails to incorporate Civil Rights Act (CRA) religious-organization protections. In fact, it includes no provisions for religious organizations. This is important, because in the current legal system and culture at large “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” includes both contraception and abortion.
“If an employee working for a religious organization requests time off to have an abortion procedure,” explained Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC, “H.R. 1065 could require the organization to comply with this request as a reasonable accommodation of known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”
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