Supreme Court protects private businesses that object to birth control
Monday morning the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the contraception provision of the Affordable Care Act, allowing employers with religious objections to refuse…
Demonstrator react to hearing the Supreme Court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby case outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, June 30, 2014. The Supreme Court says corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Monday morning the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the contraception provision of the Affordable Care Act, allowing employers with religious objections to refuse to pay for birth control.
The ruling allows some corporations to opt out of the requirement that they cover contraception for women, if it goes against their religious beliefs. The justices’ 5-4 decision is the first time that the high court has ruled that profit-seeking businesses can hold religious views under federal law.
And it means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under objecting companies’ health insurance plans.
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Birth control is among the range of preventive services that must be covered at no extra charge by health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) that Obama signed into law in 2010. Two years earlier the Supreme Court had also upheld Obamacare.
However, many private employers expressed objections and legal challenges, as best exemplified by the case of the Hobby Lobby chain of stores. Its ownerswho label the business a family-run companysay the law went against their Christian beliefs by forcing them to provide birth control in the insurance policies afforded to employees.
“Any suggestion that for-profit corporations are incapable of exercising religion because their purpose is simply to make money flies in the face of modern corporate law,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote, adding that by requiring religious corporations to cover contraception, “the HHS mandate demands that they engage in conduct that seriously violates their religious beliefs.”
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The court stressed that its ruling applies only to corporations that are under the control of just a few people in which there is no essential difference between the business and its owners, like the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and-craft stores that challenged the provision.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
