Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy

Good news from Arizona! Legislators there listened to women that their health is not up for debate! Politicians were attempting to make it more difficult for Arizona women to access insurance coverage of birth control by stripping away current protections in the state contraceptive equity law. They wanted to allow any employer with a religious objection – even the CEO of a for-profit corporation – to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage to employees. They also wanted to make it easier for those employers to fire a woman if they found out she obtained birth control on her own. Most egregious to the press and public, the bill would have forced women who work for those employers and need contraception for medical reasons to prove it.

My coworker Leila has already explained the problems with the recent decision by the Fifth Circuit overturning a district court’s block of key provisions of a Texas law forcing doctors to give women seeking abortions ultrasound information.

What Leila didn’t mention, however, was who wrote the decision: Chief Judge Edith Jones. And although I am as outraged as Leila by the decision, I’m not entirely surprised.