The court’s three female justices saif Thursday’s ruling ‘undermines the confidence in this institution’. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais /AP
The US supreme court late Thursday ruled in favor of a Christian college that believes the contraception mandate of US healthcare law burdens the school, inciting forceful dissent from the three female justices in the nation’s highest court.
In an unsigned, provisional order, the court granted a Christian college a temporary exemption from having to provide full contraception coverage to its employees and students as is mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This decision comes days after the court’s 5-4 decision in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, which provided small, for-profit corporations with a similar exemption.
The court’s three females justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan – said Thursday’s ruling introduced unnecessary layers of bureaucracy, altered the interpretation of the Hobby Lobby ruling and “undermines confidence in this institution.”
“Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word,” Sotomayor wrote. “Not so today.”
Last year, the Obama administration finalized its rules that grant churches an exemption to the mandate under the ACA. These provisions also allows religious nonprofits to request exemption by filing a form to its insurance issuer or third-party administrator.
Wheaton College in Illinois, however, believes submitting the form makes it complicit in providing contraception coverage and filed an emergency injunction to get an exemption from the protocol, arguing that the mandate burdens the school under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a key part of the Hobby Lobby ruling on Monday.
Thursday’s decision – issued late in the day before the Fourth of July holiday weekend – granted Wheaton a temporary injunction and said the school only needs to notify the government in writing that it is a nonprofit with religious objections to the contraceptive mandate.
The dissenting justices said that that even if one was to accept that the mandate burdened Wheaton college, the court’s decision to grant this injunction is “a form of relief as rare as it is extreme” and that the decision places an “unprecedented burden” on the governments’ ability to execute regulations set out in the ACA.
Wheaton’s request was denied multiple times as it circulated through lower courts. On Monday, a federal appeals court said that the injunction wasn’t warranted in light of the Hobby Lobby decision.
“I do not doubt that Wheaton genuinely believes that signing the self-certification form is contrary to its religious beliefs,” Sotomayor said. “But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened – no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be – does not make it so.”