‘Straightforward’: Federal Court Blocks Biden Admin’s Abortion Expansion through Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act

In a religious liberty win, a federal court is blocking the Biden administration from forcing Catholic and religious organizations to fund abortions. In an order issued this week, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana blocked an attempt by the Biden administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to interpret the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) in such a way that Catholic organizations would be compelled to pay for employees’ abortions in violation of their religious beliefs.

“No religious employer should ever be made to accommodate employees for obtaining abortions when facilitating an abortion contradicts the employer’s sincerely held religious beliefs. It’s good to see the court affirm that in this decision,” said Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, in comments to The Washington Stand. “Sadly, the Biden administration continues to expand abortion via any means possible — including through the EEOC’s overreaching regulation to enforce a bipartisan law written to help pregnant workers — without any regard for conscience protection or for religious freedom.”

Last month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and three other Catholic organizations filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over EEOC regulations stemming from rule changes to the PWFA made in April that would require “employers to knowingly accommodate abortions and impos[e] a speech code creating substantial liability on employers who express opposition to abortion and refuse to support it in their policies.” The lawsuit explained, “EEOC claims this authority from the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), a recent bipartisan law meant to help protect pregnant women in the workplace so that they may have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.” It continued, “The Act mentions abortion precisely zero times, in sharp contrast to the 348 times the term shows up in the new Final Rule purporting to implement the Act” (emphasis original).

The lawsuit argued that the PWFA was never meant by Congress to be “an abortion-accommodation mandate. Rather, it fills a gap in federal employment law by ensuring pregnant women receive workplace accommodations to protect their pregnancies and their preborn children.” Noting that the Catholic Church has long held “that all human life is imbued with innate dignity,” the lawsuit explained that the EEOC “has now shoehorned a mandate that employers across the country knowingly support abortion into a statute explicitly designed to protect the health and safety of preborn babies and their mothers” and further “insists on nullifying the explicit religious exemption that Congress wrote into the PWFA.”

The attorneys general of Louisiana and Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit before the same court, arguing that in addition to ignoring religious exemption provisions, the EEOC’s abortion mandate would also potentially conflict with state laws where abortion is illegal, contradicting the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that states have “legitimate interests in regulating abortion.” The district court addressed both the states’ lawsuit and the Catholic organizations’ lawsuit together.

In its order, the court declared that the EEOC “has exceeded its statutory authority to implement the PWFA and, in doing so, both unlawfully expropriated the authority of Congress and encroached upon the sovereignty of the States Plaintiffs.” The EEOC had previously argued that both the states and the Catholic organizations lack standing, alleging that neither group would be directly impacted by the rule change. The court shot down those arguments, explaining that the states would be impacted in myriad ways — including damage done to their sovereignty by an executive body overstepping the bounds proscribed by Congress — and, regarding the Catholic organizations, that “forcing religious employers to ‘choose between two untenable alternatives: either (1) violate Title VII and obey their convictions, or (2) obey Title VII and violate their convictions,’ constitutes injury.”

Regarding the arguments offered in the case, the court wrote that the states and the Catholic organizations “clearly have the stronger position” when arguing that abortion is not treatment of a “medical condition” but is rather a “procedure” that terminates a pregnancy — and a child’s life. “The decision to obtain a purely elective abortion is not undertaken to treat a ‘medical condition’ related to pregnancy or childbirth. It is thus better described as a medical ‘procedure,’ as Plaintiffs suggest. And the EEOC’s arguments to the contrary amount to little more than semantic gymnastics,” the court wrote, continuing:

“This notwithstanding, the Court sees this issue as even more straightforward. ‘Abortion’ is a term that is readily understood by everyone. If Congress had intended to mandate that employers accommodate elective abortions under the PWFA, it would have spoken clearly when enacting the statute, particularly given the enormous social, religious, and political importance of the abortion issue in our nation at this time (and, indeed, over the past 50 years). The Court is therefore not persuaded, on the record before it, that Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted the EEOC the authority to interpret the scope of the PWFA in a way that imposes a nationwide mandate on both public and private employers — irrespective of applicable abortion-related state laws enacted in the wake of Dobbs — to provide workplace accommodation for the elective abortions of employees.”

Referring to the arguments offered by the EEOC as “disingenuous,” the court observed that “abortion has been one of the most important social, religious, and political issues of our time and is a major issue in every federal election” for at least the past 50 years and that the agency must therefore be able to “clear congressional authorization” to interpret the PWFA in such a way to mandate abortion coverage. “Not only is the EEOC unable to point to any language in the PWFA empowering it to mandate the accommodation of elective abortions, but there can be little doubt in today’s political environment that any version of the PWFA that included an abortion accommodation requirement would have failed to pass Congress,” the court wrote. “The Court therefore finds that the EEOC’s arguments fail at this stage of the proceeding.”

The court also dismissed the EEOC’s citing of a “smattering of lower court opinions” regarding abortion in the context of Title VII, concluding that “a ‘supposed judicial consensus’ that ‘boils down to the decisions of two Courts of Appeals’ is not sufficiently ‘broad and unquestioned’ to support congressional ratification.” However, the court did note that lawmakers were no doubt aware of the Dobbs decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. “The EEOC’s implementing regulations incorporated the constitutional protection of abortion established in Roe v. Wade,” the court noted. “But the PWFA was enacted in December 2022, six months after the Supreme Court decided Dobbs. … With Dobbs and all of its implications fresh in the minds of lawmakers, it is not credible that Congress clearly intended that the PWFA include an abortion accommodation mandate.”

“At its core, this is a textbook case of a federal administrative agency exceeding its statutory authority in a way that both usurps the role of Congress and violates authority vested in the states under the principles of federalism,” the court concluded. The court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the EEOC’s rule change from taking effect on any employer in or headquartered in Louisiana or Mississippi and all four Catholic organizations that filed suit.

In April, Republican attorneys general from 17 states filed a lawsuit against the EEOC’s rule change, advancing arguments similar to those Louisiana and Mississippi advanced. That suit was rejected by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas last week. Obama-appointed Judge D.P. Marshall, Jr. claimed that the states lacked standing.