Today news broke of a leaked draft regulation that would provide an extremely broad exemption for employers to refuse coverage for birth control to their employees.
National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director Mara Keisling said:
This rule would not only deny hundreds of thousands of women access to birth control, but lays the groundwork for a sweeping license to discriminate against women, LGBT people, religious minorities, and deny health care when people need it most. The logic behind this proposal would turn our civil rights laws into civil rights suggestions."
The leaked Interim Final Rule would expand the exemption that currently applies to churches and other houses of worship to include any kind of employer—including for-profit corporations of any size—who claim moral or religious objections. It also creates exemptions for colleges, universities to deny birth control coverage for students, and for insurance companies to exclude birth control for all their plans. It also states that there is no compelling government interest in ensuring access to birth control for employees or students of organizations that object to it.
The Trump administration has already attacked transgender people’s access to health care by announcing on May 2 that it plans to roll back rules interpreting the Affordable Care Act to prohibit discrimination against transgender people. And on May 4, President Trump directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to draft potentially wide-ranging guidance on religious exemptions to other federal laws.
