American Civil Liberties Union

There are now close to 40 challenges to the federal birth control rule, which ensures that employees have insurance coverage for contraception.  Why so many lawsuits, you ask?  The answer is not entirely clear, but one thing is certain: each case repeats the same misguided argument that an employer’s religious beliefs can be used as a license to discriminate against its female employees.  As we have explained in greater detail their legal claims are unsupported by a long history of cases.  We’ve filed friend-of-the-court briefs in several contraception suits discussing those cases, all of which rejected other attempts to use religious beliefs as a basis for discrimination.  In the last week alone, we’ve filed three briefs: one in a case in Michigan with the ACLU of Michigan, and two others with the ACLU of Illinois.

Do we need another reminder about how state legislatures are a key battleground for women's health? Or about how so many politicians are out of touch? We do not. But we got one anyway.

Yesterday, the Missouri legislature voted to override Governor Jay Nixon's veto of SB 749, a bill that aims to undermine a woman's access to comprehensive health care. SB 749 attempts to allow employers to refuse to provide contraception coverage to their employees, despite the new federal rule that prevents such discrimination against women and the health care benefits they need.

This Mother's Day, we need to work towards a country where women's work is truly respected and valued both inside and outside of the home.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled, by the all-too-familiar 5-4 margin, that a provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) giving workers time off to care for their own serious health conditions — including pregnancy and childbirth — can't be enforced by state employees in damages lawsuits against their public employers. The decision in Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland effectively stripped many public employees — the majority of whom are women — of the right to job protection when they need to take time off while pregnant. The ACLU had joined an amicus brief arguing that the law was written in a gender-neutral way to provide women workers with the time they needed to go through childbirth and pregnancy-related complications, while ensuring that employers wouldn't discriminate based on the assumption that only women will need to take health-related leave from their jobs. While no opinion garnered five votes, a majority of the Court agreed that the law was not justified as a remedy for a pattern of unconstitutional discrimination against women or pregnant workers.