Earlier this month, a federal judge permanently blocked a part of the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) regulation that required medical professionals to perform abortions and gender-transition procedures regardless of their religious convictions. If the ACA rule had stood, physicians would be faced with performing surgeries, against their Christian convictions, on children or teenagers who identified as the opposite sex, a girl who wants to be a boy or a boy who wants to be a girl.
Mike Chupp, a Christian physician and CEO of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA), said of the decision, “We would have been in a world of hurt as Christians because we would have been thinking about leaving or limiting our practices so as not to be in a bind. Christians take care of the poor, take lower salaries, take care of refugees, and take care of those on the fringe who are uninsured. That’s why religious freedom is just so critical for us to protect.”
The ruling is just one of many religious freedom court cases being fought in the United States today. For the past six years, the Little Sisters of the Poor have also challenged a mandate of the Affordable Care Act requiring them to provide contraceptive services in their healthcare plans. Becket, a religious liberty law firm representing the Sisters, has petitioned the Supreme Court three times for an exemption to the ACA contraceptive and abortifacient mandate.
Mark Rienzi, president of Becket, said “This is a nonsensical political battle that has dragged on six years too long. These states have not been able to identify a single person who would lose contraceptive coverage under the new HHS rule, but they won’t rest until Catholic nuns are forced to pay for contraceptives. It is time for the Supreme Court to finally put this issue to rest.”
In Chicago, the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group, has filed a complaint against the state of Illinois over a new abortion law that requires health insurance policies to cover elective abortions. Michael McHale, counsel for the Thomas More Society, told the Christian Post that the new law puts them in a double bind, “Either we purchase health insurance plans that cover abortion and violate our deeply held religious and moral principles, or we abide by our principles and forgo providing insurance, thereby violating our conscientious duties to offer appropriate benefits to our employees and severely undermining our ability to provide a suitable place of employment.”
Christian principles will continue to come under attack. We must pray for those who try to restrict our religious beliefs and for the courts that face the task of making decisions that allow us to continue to have religious freedom.