Trump right to target California on abortion-services health insurance requirement
On Jan. 24 the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a notice of violation to California for its 2014 mandate that all insurance plans sold in the state cover elective abortion. California has 30 days to alter its unlawful, conscience-violating requirement for abortion coverage, or else forfeit certain sources of federal funding.
Some history is in order. Emails discovered in litigation reveal that, in 2014, executives from Planned Parenthood were in communication with officials in the California Department of Managed Healthcare, expressing dissatisfaction that certain religious employers (specifically, Catholic universities Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount) did not include abortion coverage in their employer-based health plans. While this makes sense in light of the ethical and religious principles on which these schools were founded, Planned Parenthood wanted to find a way for the state to force these employers to violate their religious convictions and offer abortion coverage.
California heard Planned Parenthood’s complaints, and acted on them. In August of 2014, the Department of Managed Healthcare sent a series of letters to major insurers redefining the kinds of “essential services” that must be included in all insurance plans, stating that abortion coverage must be included. The letters decreed that no employer could seek an exception to these decrees, not even a religious employer that opposes abortion for deeply held ethical and doctrinal reasons.
Thus, in one day, a radical policy change took place in California without a vote by the Legislature, a signature from the governor, or a popular referendum: every insurance plan sold in the state now must cover abortion. Every employer in the state, including churches and orders of Catholic nuns, must provide abortion-covering insurance plans, or else not provide insurance at all.
This is not the neutral act of a moderate government. It was a ham-fisted, unprecedented violation of the ethical convictions of thousands of California employers, imposed at the behest of powerful special interests.
It was also in clear, obvious violation of federal law. The 2009 Weldon Amendment deprives certain streams of federal healthcare funding to states that discriminate against health insurance plans that do not cover abortion. Banning such plans from existing is clearly a form of “discrimination.”
This is not an unreasonable imposition, but a straightforward, Obama-era requirement that states respect the basic conscience rights of employers, including religious employers who want to provide coverage for their employees in a fashion consistent with their beliefs. This makes particular sense for abortion, a procedure that is chosen overwhelmingly for nonmedical reasons.
In spite of the fact that such actions obviously should have resulted in California losing federal funding, Barack Obama simply refused to enforce this provision of federal law against California. When complaints about California’s mandate reached the Obama HHS in 2014, they stalled for over a year, and then issued a 2016 opinion that California’s policy did not violate the Weldon Amendment.
This history clarifies what is at the heart of the issue with the Trump administration’s recent actions. This controversy does not center on abortion’s legality, but on whether unwilling employers should be forced to pay for abortion against their legitimate religious and moral beliefs. The Trump administration was not so much “roll[ing] back abortion protections,” as the Fresno Bee’s January 24th story stated, but rather reinforcing superseding federal conscience law.
President Trump’s action is being characterized as an attack on abortion rights, or an attack on health-care funding for California. These are both untrue, and they are the cynical party line of a political movement that favors abortion access at any expense.
Some people sloppily refer to the First Amendment as merely protecting “freedom of worship,” but it protects more than that. The First Amendment protects the “free exercise of religion.” People of faith are not protected from government intrusions simply within the walls of their churches on Sunday morning. Rather, the protections of the Constitution allow people of faith to live out their lawful convictions in the public square and in their own businesses and charitable works. In that spirit, the Trump administration’s action was a welcome check against California’s reckless attack on free exercise.
This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 2:17 PM.