Who knew that women making personal and consequential decisions about how to regulate fertility should now factor in the religious views of her employer? Most women making medical decisions about their reproductive choices might consider any number of factors: health, age, income, religious views, relationship status, plans for the future, for example. But for some women, bosses will now have a say, thanks to a decision today by a divided US Supreme Court.
The 5-4 decision holds that some for-profit corporations, like the plaintiff Hobby Lobby, can refuse to include contraception in employee health plans based on the corporate owner’s religious views that life begins at conception. Religious organizations such as churches were already exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to provide cost-free birth control coverage. Today’s decision goes a giant step further in extending that exemption to secular, for-profit employers with religious objections to contraception. Since over two-thirds of employed American adults under 65 get their health insurance through an employer, this means that millions of women across the country just saw the decision about whether they will have access to affordable birth control turned over to their boss.
Today’s ruling has broad implications for women’s rights in the United States, not just in the realm of reproductive rights and health. In Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, she recalls the court’s pronouncement in the landmark 1992 case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey: “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
When the contraceptive mandate went into effect in 2012, an estimated 47 million women in the US gained access to cost-free birth control, and with it greater access to equality in marriage and family life, education, health, employment, political participation, and beyond. Today’s decision endangers all of those gains.
