(LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana temporarily blocked the Biden administration from attempting to interpret the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) to force even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to pay for abortions.
Passed in 2022, the PWFA requires employers make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant employees. Last fall, the Biden administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) proposed a rule that would define “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” in the PWFA as encompassing “having or choosing not to have an abortion.”
As explained at the time by Republican U.S. Reps. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Mary Miller of Illinois, the PWFA does not include abortion in its text, and in fact the lawmakers who enacted it said they did so with the express understanding that it did not confer any requirement to facilitate, assist, or accommodate a decision to abort. Some warned two years earlier that the PWFA could be used to infringe on pro-life employers’ conscience rights, yet it passed with the support of the USCCB.
Last month, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, along with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, sued a federal lawsuit to block enforcement of the new rule against employers who object to complicity in abortion.
On Monday, the court issued a temporary injunction against the administration, determining that “EEOC has exceeded its statutory authority to implement the PWFA,” in the process “unlawfully expropriat(ing) the authority of Congress and encroach(ing) upon the sovereignty of the States Plaintiffs.” The Biden administration has 60 days to appeal.
“‘Abortion’ is a term that is readily understood by everyone,” the ruling noted. “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.” Instead, the legislative record “unambiguously confirms that Congress specifically did not intend for the PWFA to require employers to accommodate abortion,” which EEOC attempted to circumvent with “semantic gymnastics” and “disingenuous” arguments.
“The EEOC twisted a law protecting expecting mothers and their babies and co-opted the workplaces of over 130 million Americans to support abortion,” Becket attorney Laura Wolk Slavis responded. “That is an abuse of power – no one should have to choose between their conscience and protecting pregnant women (…) This ruling is an important step in ensuring that American workplaces can be free to continue serving their communities consistent with their beliefs.”
Uncompromising, multi-front support for abortion-on-demand has been one of President Joe Biden’s top priorities in office. He has used his State of the Union addresses to vow to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again” if the fall elections re-elect him and give him enough votes in Congress to codify a nationwide “right” to abortion, and his administration has touted a “whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights” (a popular euphemism for legal abortion on demand), including increased taxpayer funding for abortion at home and abroad, attempted waiving of federal safety rules against distributing abortion pills by mail, and attempting to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) to force emergency room doctors to perform abortions under certain circumstances.