WASHINGTON -- More employers who cite religious or moral grounds have the right to decline to offer cost-free birth-control coverage to their workers, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, upholding Trump administration rules.
The high court ruled 7-2 for the administration, which had made a policy change to allow some employers to opt out of providing the no-cost birth control required by the Obama-era health care law. Lower courts had previously blocked changes made by President Donald Trump's administration.
Separately Wednesday, the Supreme Court sided with two Catholic schools in California in a decision underscoring that certain employees of religious schools, hospitals and social service centers can't sue for employment discrimination. That ruling, too, was by 7-2, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting in both cases.
The court had ruled unanimously in 2012 that the Constitution prevents ministers from suing their churches for employment discrimination, but at that time the justices didn't specifically define who counts as a minister. The case decided Wednesday involved lay teachers whose contracts had not been renewed.
In the birth control case, two liberal justices who sided with the administration, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, nonetheless suggested that the legal fight over the Trump administration changes may not be over. Future administrations also could attempt changes.
"Today's Supreme Court ruling is a big win for religious freedom and freedom of conscience," White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement, adding that the court had "once again vindicated the conscience rights of people of faith."
"Since Day One, the Trump administration has sought to lift burdens on religious exercise for people of all faiths" she said, adding that the administration would work to allow "women who lack access to contraceptive coverage because of their employer's religious beliefs or moral convictions to more easily access such care" through federal programs.
Disagreeing, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in statement, "It is unconscionable that, in the middle of the worst global pandemic in modern history, the administration is focusing on denying basic health care to women that is essential for their health and financial security, instead of protecting lives and livelihoods."
COURT MAJORITY
The administration has the statutory authority to craft the rules involved, including "the contemporaneously issued moral exemption," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for a majority of the court.
"We hold that the [administration] had the authority to provide exemptions from the regulatory contraceptive requirements for employers with religious and conscientious objections," wrote Thomas, who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., and Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The government had previously estimated that the rule changes would cause about 70,000-126,000 women to lose contraception coverage in one year.
Ginsburg cited those numbers in dissenting.
"Today, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree," she wrote. Until now, "this court has taken a balanced approach, one that does not allow the religious beliefs of some to overwhelm the rights and interests of others who do not share those beliefs," Ginsburg wrote in a brief joined by Sotomayor.
In March 2010, former President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which includes a section that requires coverage of preventive health services and screenings for women. The next year, the Obama administration required employers and insurers to provide women with coverage at no cost for all methods of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Houses of worship, including churches, temples and mosques, were exempt from the requirement. But nonprofit groups like schools and hospitals affiliated with religious organizations were not.
Some of those groups objected to providing coverage for any of the approved forms of contraception. Others objected to contraception that they said was tantamount to abortion.
'MORAL CONVICTIONS'
The Trump administration took the side of the religious employers, saying that requiring contraception coverage can impose a "substantial burden" on the free exercise of religion. The regulations it has promulgated made good on a campaign pledge by Trump, who has said that employers should not be "bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs."
The new regulations also included an exception for employers "with sincerely held moral convictions opposed to coverage of some or all contraceptive or sterilization methods."
The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged the rules, saying they would have to shoulder much of the cost of providing contraceptives to women who lost coverage under the Trump administration's rules.
Last year, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia blocked the regulations, issuing a nationwide preliminary injunction. Making exceptions to the requirement that employers provide women with coverage of contraception at no cost would have a large practical effect, Judge Patty Shwartz wrote for the panel.
That, in turn, she wrote, would disproportionately affect access to contraception for poor women.
"Cost is a significant barrier to contraceptive use and access," she wrote. "The most effective forms of contraceptives are the most expensive. After the [Affordable Care Act] removed cost barriers, women switched to the more effective and expensive methods of contraception."
The coverage requirement, sometimes called the contraceptive mandate, has been the subject of much litigation, reaching the Supreme Court twice.
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
In 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the court ruled that requiring family owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception violated a federal law protecting religious liberty. The law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, says that government requirements placing a substantial burden on religious practices are subject to an exceptionally demanding form of judicial scrutiny.
Alito, writing for the majority, said there was a better alternative, one that the government had offered to nonprofit groups with religious objections.
That accommodation allowed the groups not to pay for coverage and to avoid fines if they informed their insurers, plan administrators or the government that they wanted an exemption. Insurance companies or the government would then pay for the coverage.
Many religious groups around the nation challenged the accommodation, saying that objecting and providing the required information would make them complicit in conduct that violated their faith.
An eight-member court considered that objection in 2016 in Zubik v. Burwell but was unable to reach a definitive ruling and instead returned the case to the lower courts, instructing them to consider whether a compromise could be reached.
Reproductive-rights groups were alarmed by Wednesday's decision.
NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue released the following statement:
"The Supreme Court's decision to allow the Trump administration to put control over people's birth control in the hands of the whims of their bosses and employers is deplorable. This decision just further exposes that ultimately, the Radical Right is really about controlling women and our lives with no eye towards equality or public health and well being."
Religious groups said the legal battles should stop.
"We are overjoyed that, once again, the Supreme Court has protected our right to serve the elderly without violating our faith," said Mother Loraine Marie Maguire of the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose employees work in the group's facilities.
"Our life's work and great joy is serving the elderly poor, and we are so grateful that the contraceptive mandate will no longer steal our attention from our calling."
RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS
In the ruling regarding religious schools, Alito wrote in his majority opinion that allowing courts to consider workplace discrimination claims against the schools would interfere with the schools' constitutionally guaranteed religious independence.
"The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission," Alito wrote.
In her dissent, Sotomayor warned that as many as 100,000 employees could lose the right to contest job discrimination as a result of the ruling.
"The Court reaches this result even though the teachers taught primarily secular subjects, lacked substantial religious titles and training, and were not even required to be Catholic," Sotomayor wrote in an opinion that was joined by Ginsburg.
In a statement, Eric Rassbach, the lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who argued the case for the schools, called the decision a "huge win for religious schools of all faith traditions."
"The last thing government officials should do is decide who is authorized to teach Catholicism to Catholics or Judaism to Jews. We are glad the Court has resoundingly reaffirmed that churches and synagogues, not government, control who teaches kids about God," he said.
2 WOMEN'S CASES
The case was one of 10 for which the high court heard arguments by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic.
It involved two schools in Southern California that were sued by former teachers. In one case, Kristen Biel sued St. James Catholic School in Torrance, Calif., for disability discrimination after she disclosed that she had breast cancer and her teaching contract wasn't renewed.
In the other case, Agnes Morrissey-Berru sued Our Lady of Guadalupe school in Hermosa Beach, Calif., alleging age discrimination after her teaching contract wasn't renewed when she was in her 60s. The lawsuits were both initially dismissed, but an appeals court revived them. The Trump administration had backed the schools.
Biel died last year at age 54 after a five-year battle with breast cancer. Her husband has represented her side in her place.
Lawyers for Biel and Morrissey-Berru did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Jessica Gresko and Mark Sherman of The Associated Press; by Adam Liptak of The New York Times; and by Robert Barnes of The Washington Post.
