Trump’s Birth Control Mandate Pits Religious Freedom Against Reproductive Rights

This past week, Donald Trump issued a new regulation that enables religious or moral ideology to impact health care coverage.  Specifically, this policy gives universities and employers the discretion, based on theology, to remove birth-control coverage from their health care packages. This policy has jeopardized contraceptive access for hundreds of thousands of women in the states, inflaming the decade-old controversy surrounding the scope of religious liberty in the realm of secular capitalist society. 

Trump’s policy is met with support from his Republican camp since it expands the role of religious freedom at the expense of reproductive rights. Speaker Paul Ryan called the rules “a landmark day for religious liberty”, since it gives firms with “strongly held religious beliefs” against contraception the freedom to no longer provide access to contraceptives. 

However, many worry that this case expands the potential for further acts of social conservativism in our capitalist society. For example, there is fear that this legislation could create a precedent that threatens civil rights for the LGBTQ community, by making religious beliefs capable of exempting employers from non-discrimination laws. 

This policy is confronted by a powerful backlash from women’s rights advocates, who claim the policy is discriminatory against women. These advocates point to the policy’s negation of the rights of women under the Affordable Care Act, which grant access to contraceptives at no cost.

The Affordable Care Act did acknowledge exceptions, enabling particular organizations that are inherently religious to opt-out of contraceptive coverage. However, Trump’s regulations allow for employers of organizations that are not inherently religions to refuse coverage, meaning refusal is no longer seen as exceptional.  As a result, this policy will impact women who are working outside of industries that are religious in nature.  

Contraceptives are used not only for family planning, but also for the myriad of other health benefits that they provide, including treatment of hormonal imbalances and endometriosis. These benefits are what account for the roughly 58 percent of women who use contraceptives for reasons outside of pregnancy prevention. For many women, access to birth control is instrumental in leading healthy lives and pursuing their educational and career goals. 

Dr. Haywood Brown, president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said that reducing access to contraceptives could have externalities on maternal mortality, the wellbeing of the community, and economic stability for women and families.

Following the release of this new regulation, several lawsuits were filed against Donald Trump. These lawsuits are being filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Women’s Law Center, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the office of the California Attorney General. One Senior Attorney, Brigitte Amiri, justified her lawsuit in a statement claiming, “the Trump administration is forcing women to pay for their boss’ religious beliefs”. 

The controversy at hand is by no means new. However, this case illustrates a stark shift in the degree to which policy is enforcing religious ideology in corporate America. This policy allows the First Amendment right of religious freedom to have economic teeth in obstructing constitutional rights to liberty and privacy.