The Supreme Court will weigh the future of Obamacare’s birth control mandate on April 29.
Justices will consider whether employers can deny birth control coverage to their workers because of religious or moral objections to the products. The Trump administration allowed such exemptions for employers, loosening a rule the Obama administration had put in place as part of Obamacare.
The case set for oral arguments consolidates two challenges, Trump v. Pennsylvania and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania.
The battle over birth control has been simmering since soon after Obamacare’s passage, and questions about how far the government can go in requiring such coverage have reached the Supreme Court twice before.
Under President Barack Obama, the rule officials set had exemptions for houses of worship. The latest religious exemption set under President Trump applies to any type of employer, but the moral exemption doesn’t apply to publicly traded businesses or government entities. The administration estimated that between 6,400 and 127,000 women would be affected.
Liberal states sued over the Trump administration rules, and they have been blocked by different federal courts.
On the other side of the debate are anti-abortion and religious organizations that asked for the Trump administration to allow for exemptions to the mandate. Some organizations oppose all forms of contraception, while others oppose specific kinds, such as intrauterine devices and emergency contraception, which they say induce an abortion because their labels say they can prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration had violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and asked the Obama administration to find a workaround to the initial rule.
After the administration did so, groups again challenged the Obama administration in court, though the Supreme Court left the question unresolved. The Trump administration took up the rules again and wrote broader exemptions.
