CALIFORNIA (LifeSiteNews) – A U.S. district court ruled Thursday that California must exempt employers such as churches from paying for abortions in their health insurance plans.
Three California churches sued the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) after it sent letters in 2014 to private health insurers “directing them to remove any limitations on … abortion care services from the health care coverage they offered to various employers.”
DMHC sent the letters after Planned Parenthood asked the state to “fix” such exemptions “to ensure that employers cannot deny women coverage of abortion services,” according to emails shared by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys.
At least two health insurers mistakenly believed they could not provide religious exemptions to churches to effectively preclude abortion coverage, because the 2014 letters failed to mention that California law allowed individual insurance plans to request such an exemption.
Thus, plaintiff churches Foothill Church, Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, and the Shepherd of the Hills Church sued, being “under the impression that they could not secure coverage that comported with their religious beliefs,” according to the ruling issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
While “at least one plan sought and received an exemption from the requirement to provide abortion,” DMHC’s director “later testified she could not recall and was ‘not involved in the details of’ approving this amended plan contract.”
Moreover, when the plaintiff churches requested a religious exemption in July 2018, California’s Deputy Attorney General replied that DMHC “has no regulatory authority or jurisdiction over plan customers, including employers who purchase coverage for their employees,” but DMHC would “consider granting” a health plan an exemption if a plan requested one.
The DMHC director cited this policy in explaining her decision not to grant exemptions to the churches, arguing that state law only allowed her to grant such exemptions to policies themselves.
The court found “that the DMHC does not have good reasons to deny exemptions to employers and not just plans,” rejecting each reason cited by the DMHC director.
For example, the court dismissed as “speculative” the objection that the current policy would prevent “a flood of exemption requests from over 26 million enrollees,” should exemptions be granted to employers or individuals.
“The DMHC could reject outlandish requests on their merits and limit requests to those from employers like the Churches, rather than individuals,” the court argued in response.
To the objection that state law restricted exemptions to the insurance plans themselves, the court responded, “Nonetheless, nothing in the statutory text explicitly precludes [the DMHC Director] from fielding requests for exemptions from religious claimants.”
The court added that nothing seems to prevent the director from “directing the religious claimant’s plan” to apply for a revised health coverage plan.
“In sum, the Director has not shown ‘[she] lacks other means of achieving [her] desired goal without imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion by [plaintiffs],’” the court concluded.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the nonprofit legal organization that represented the churches, celebrated the decision as a win for religious conscience rights.
“The government can’t force a church or any other religious employer to violate their faith and conscience by participating in funding abortion,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jeremiah Galus, according to an ADF press release. “For years, California has unconstitutionally targeted faith-based organizations, so we’re pleased the court has found this mandate unconstitutional and will allow the churches we represent to operate freely according to their religious beliefs.”
“Elective abortions are not part of ‘basic health care,’” Galus added. “They have no business being forced into the medical coverage provided by churches that do not wish to support terminating lives due to very real, sincere, and well-known faith convictions.”