Democrats call Trump’s birth control insurance plan unconstitutional

Birth Control insurance

The administration plans to roll back yet another one of Obama’s health coverage requirements.

The Trump administrations strategy to undo a requirement for employers to provide workers with birth control insurance in their health plans is a religious endorsement and it is unconstitutional, say a group consisting of 19 Democratic state attorneys general.

The reason is that Trump’s plan allows an employer’s religious objections to block an employee’s coverage.

Trump’s plan gives employers the opportunity to stop their employees from receiving birth control insurance on religious or moral grounds. The Democratic state attorneys general group says this violates the separation between church and state. Moreover, the group says this encourages illegal workplace discrimination against women. The group filed a brief earlier this week in a Philadelphia federal court outlining their legal objections to the intended rollback of the birth control coverage requirement implemented by the Obama administration.

The Affordable Care Act provides over 55 million American women with birth control insurance coverage.

Birth Control insuranceThis coverage means that American women have access to the birth control they need without facing costs out of their own pockets. However, as a part of President Trump’s ongoing efforts to remove every change put into place by the Obama administration, he has opted to increase the religious rights of employers while reducing women’s access to contraception.

“A wealth of research demonstrates the critical importance of contraceptive coverage for the health of women and children as well as the economic security of women and their families,” said the brief from the attorneys general.

A number of lawsuits have already been filed against the proposed rules against contraception coverage. They have now been joined by the group of state attorneys general. Among the previous suits already filed include those by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Massachusetts Attorney General Healey is now heading the group that recently filed the federal birth control insurance brief in Pennsylvania. The additional attorneys general joined Healey in that particular case when the judge for that case made a request for any interested parties to have their say on the matter.

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