26 Religious Colleges Take Stand Against Abortion-Pill Mandate
The battle against the HHS mandate continues, as 26 religious colleges have objected to the abortion-pill portion of the mandate.
Alliance Defending Freedom has submitted official comments to the Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of 22 Catholic colleges and higher-education programs and four Protestant colleges explaining their objections to the Obama administration’s abortion-pill mandate.
The mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to facilitate insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception under threat of heavy penalties.
“Christian colleges and academic institutions should be free to operate according to their faith,” says senior legal counsel Matt Bowman. “The Obama administration claims ‘unwavering’ support for religious freedom, but the abortion-pill mandate demonstrates that the only thing unwavering is the administration’s tenacious opposition to that freedom.”
Alliance Defending Freedom authored both legal comments to explain that the Christian academic institutions oppose the mandate and are urging the Obama administration “to exempt all those with a religious or moral objection.” The memo highlights that “no other federal rule has so narrowly and discriminatorily defined what it means to exercise religious conscience.”
The comments also explain that the mandate and its subsequent “accommodation,” “blatantly violate the right to religious freedom protected throughout federal law, including under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act … and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The Obama administration has lost a total of 17 federal-court decisions against the mandate. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys and allied attorneys are currently litigating 10 lawsuits against the mandate, representing a large cross-section of Catholics and Protestants who object to it.
