Leila Abolfazli, Senior Counsel

Last Wednesday started off a week’s worth of bad court decisions in cases that directly affect women’s reproductive health.

It all started off with the 8th Circuit upholding a South Dakota law that requires doctors to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she would be subjected to “increased risk of suicide ideation or suicide” if she had an abortion. The court seemed unconcerned with the fact that a woman would likely interpret the disclosure as telling her that having an abortion would cause her to be at an increased risk of suicide (a link the scientific studies do not support). Making constrained arguments about relative risk and scientific “uncertainty,” the court rubberstamped a misleading disclosure that will only confuse women in South Dakota seeking abortion care. Decision outcome: it’s ok to mislead women? Check.

Second, a district court in Colorado temporarily stopped the health care law’s contraceptive coverage requirement from taking effect for a for-profit CO company, which specializes in heating and cooling systems, based on the claim that requiring coverage of birth control in a health insurance plan violated the company’s religious freedom. After the judge determined that questions like whether a for profit HVAC company can exercise religion “merit more deliberate investigation,” the court then decided that the government had failed to show it had a compelling interest in providing women access to contraceptive coverage and that there were less restrictive means for doing so. Decision outcome: it’s ok for your boss to make health care decisions for you? Check.

Yesterday, the National Women's Law Center submitted comments on the Administration's proposed "accommodation" for organizations that have religious objections to covering contraception in their health insurance plans for employees. In our comments, we state that the priority in structuring the accommodation must be to ensure women have seamless access to contraception no matter where they are employed or enrolled as university students.

The backstory: back in August of last year, the Administration announced that contraception would be one of the eight women's preventive services that insurance plans would have to start covering without cost sharing in August of 2012. When the announcement was made, the Administration also announced a religious exemption to the rule requiring insurance plans to cover contraception. Those of us at the Law Center thought that the exemption should be eliminated completely as it has no basis under law and arbitrarily precludes certain women from having their needed preventive care. However, other groups complained that the exemption should be expanded to include hospitals and universities.

After receiving over 200,000 comments on the issue, the Administration announced in January that it was not changing the exemption. With a sustained backlash from certain groups and media outlets (culminating in the infamous Where Are the Women hearing, which denied Sandra Fluke the opportunity to testify), the Administration announced an "accommodation" to the requirement.