The battle over birth control and the Affordable Care Act wages on. A handful of liberal state attorneys general have sued the federal government over its new contraception-coverage rules, which exempt employers with religious or moral objections from including birth control in their employee health-insurance plans.
For years, religious businesses and nonprofits pounded the government with lawsuits over Obamacare’s birth-control-coverage requirement, until a Supreme Court decision, and, later, the Trump administration, essentially resolved their objections. Now, it’s liberal lawyers who are stoking the culture war. The same players have switched sides and are headed back to the courts, which seem doomed to keep adjudicating disagreements between ever-revolving political majorities.
The lawsuits are headed up by predictable players. Pennsylvania and California headline separate complaints, with Delaware, Maryland, New York, and Virginia joining the latter. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a former Democratic U.S. representative, has repeatedly taken up the role of liberal culture-warrior under Trump; last spring, for example, he filed felony charges against the pro-life activists who secretly filmed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the organization’s distribution of fetal tissue. Pennsylvania recently joined other blue states in challenging the Trump administration’s intention to end DACA, the Obama-era program that protected some undocumented young people from deportation.