Leila Abolfazli, Senior Counsel

Last Friday, District Court Judge Carol Jackson dismissed a case filed by O’Brien Industrial Holdings and Frank O’Brien (the owner) against the HHS rule requiring health insurance coverage of birth control with no co-pay. In a decision that is worthy of reading a couple of times over (PDF), Judge Jackson explained in careful detail why, in fact, the HHS rule does not violate the statutory or constitutional claims made by O’Brien and his for-profit mining company (in which he claimed that the rule violated the company’s and his religious liberty).

There are some great lines in the decision. One of my favorites is:

The rule does not "directly and inevitably prevent plaintiffs from acting in accordance with their religious beliefs. Frank O’Brien is not prevented from keeping the Sabbath, from providing a religious upbringing for his children, or from participating in a religious ritual such as communion. Instead, plaintiffs remain free to exercise their religion, by not using contraceptives and by discouraging employees from using contraceptives..."

Such a line says what we have been saying all along... the birth control rule does not violate religious freedom.

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.