A federal judge blocked the administration Monday from enforcing its birth-control mandate on a nonprofit known for its massive D.C. rallies against abortion, saying the secular group deserves the same protection as religious employers who aren’t required to insure contraceptives under Obamacare.

In a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said if the Health and Human Services Department thought employees of churches and other religious employers were unlikely to want the contraceptives its mandate provides, including morning-after pills that some equate with abortion, then it should defer to March for Life, a fiercely pro-life group that says its employees don’t want them, either.

“HHS may be correct that this objection is common among religiously-affiliated employers. Where HHS has erred, however, is in assuming that this trait is unique to such organizations. It is not,” wrote Judge Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush.

March for Life was founded in 1973, after the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade decision. Every year, it brings thousands to the National Mall and Capitol Hill to to protest the landmark ruling.

Since it is non-religious, March for Life does not qualify for the blanket exemption from the birth control mandate that houses of worship enjoy, and it does not qualify for a contentious accommodation that HHS extended to faith-based nonprofits that objected to the mandate, nor is it seeking to, according to court papers.

Judge Leon said the government was being hypocritical when it boxed out the organization that shares the same concerns as religious employers who’ve gotten a pass from the mandate.

“March for Life,” he wrote, “has been excised from the fold because it is not ‘religious.’ This is nothing short of regulatory favoritism.”

As a secular nonprofit, March for Life has opened a new chapter in the long-running saga over the birth-control mandate, an outgrowth of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 that requires employers to cover 20 types of FDA-approved drugs and services as part of their health plans. Pitched as a boon for women’s health, the rules quickly spawned controversy, with dozens of religious nonprofits and devout business owners filing suit.

Family-owned for-profit corporations were victorious before the Supreme Court last year, forcing HHS to draft an accommodation for them. Those rules, finalized last month, grant closely held corporations the same type of opt-out clause that HHS offered religious nonprofits.

Under that policy, faith-based universities and charities notify either their insurers or the federal government of their objection to providing contraception, and the insurers or plan administrators would then step in and make sure employees can get contraception without the religious charity having to pay for it.

Many of the faith-based groups have rejected the compromise, though, saying they’re still complicit in sin. They’ve been unable to convince several federal appeals courts that they’re still burdened by the rules, however, so they’ve asked the Supreme Court to take up their case.

Both sides of the debate said Judge Leon’s decision broke new ground.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the nonprofit in court, said it was the first time a court found in favor of a plaintiff who objected to the mandate on moral, and not religious, grounds.

“Pro-life organizations should not be forced into betraying the very values they were established to advance,” ADF senior legal counsel Matt Bowman said. “This is especially true of March for Life, which was founded to uphold life, not to assist in taking it.

Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports the mandate, said the decision was notable because it appeared to be the first to “reach a claim on behalf of a ‘secular’ nonprofit.”

“The decision is an overreach in many regards, including the breadth of the relief: it purports to grant the plaintiff a wholesale exemption rather than just an extension of the accommodation,” she said. “Hopefully the appeals court will correct these errors.”

March for Life and its Catholic president, Jeanne F. Monahan, and employee Bethany A. Goodman, an evangelical Protestant, had sued HHS, the Labor Department and the Treasury, hoping to block the mandate so it could provide coverage without the objectionable contraceptives.

Judge Leon rejected the government’s argument that only the employer, and not March for Life employees, are affected by the mandate, since the employees are considered “participants” who pay premiums in the company’s plan.

“Given the nature of health insurance, employee plaintiffs do play a role in the health care that plans that prove contraceptive coverage,” he wrote. (Source: The Washington Times)

Story Date: September 1, 2015