In 2014, when Republicans and certain business entities made birth control a major national issue, I thought that certainly the GOP had lost its way – and its political compass.
After all, birth control as a form of family planning had become a central tenet of American society starting in the 1970s. It allowed women to gain a foothold in the workforce and ended the days of many wives “barefoot and pregnant,” cooking in the kitchen.
Yet, a family-owned Religious Right corporation, Hobby Lobby, challenged and won a Supreme Court case in ’14 against the Obama administration by declaring that their religious beliefs opposing contraception should trump the Obamacare rules that required health insurance coverage for birth control measures.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a charitable group of nuns that cares for the elderly, also weighed in, apparently clueless as to how their old-school Catholic values had been pushed aside long ago by the new reality within their religion, with dominant forces led by “cafeteria Catholics” – those under the age of, let’s say 70, who pick and choose which dictates from the church they follow.
Still, the GOP somehow paid no price for adhering to a regressive policy that seemed woefully out of touch with 21st Century America.
Religious business owners and nonprofits successfully used the federal courts to partially wipe out Obamacare’s birth-control-coverage requirement, based on the premise of religious freedom. More recently, the Trump administration cemented their world view.
But the battle over birth control and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates has entered a new stage. Now, we have a handful of liberal state attorneys general suing the Trump administration, challenging the view that employers cannot be exempted from the contraception mandate based on religious or moral objections.
In 2017, it’s liberal lawyers who are stoking the culture war and hoping for a backlash. According to The Atlantic magazine, state attorneys in Pennsylvania, California, Delaware, Maryland, New York and Virginia have waged wide-ranging legal battles against the Trump administration for issuing new federal rules that reinforce the court rulings.
The legal arguments hinge on claims that the Trump orders illegally force the states to swallow contraception costs that, under the ACA, were supposed to be handled by the feds. California’s lawsuit asserts that 25 businesses in the state, with a combined 55,000 employees, have established a refusal to provide contraception coverage for their workers.
In turn, many of the California female employees caught up in this ideological tug of war will likely turn to local, publicly funded clinics or state programs for their birth control.
As with many, many major issues facing the nation, birth control standards may become an ongoing fight in the courts as control of Washington between Republicans and Democrats remains in the balance for years to come.
The Atlantic’s Emma Green summarizes the situation this way:
As Congress keeps up its nonstop political standoffs, and the country sinks further into sharp division over the Trump administration, the courts may be the primary arena where policymaking actually happens. In this case, litigation has ping-ponged back and forth between the two sides as the federal government shifted its stance. As the birth-control issue comes back around for another spin in the headlines, cultural roles have shifted, too: It’s no longer the religious groups fighting a culture war against what they see as a tyrannical majority. It’s liberals.
