In a significant victory for pro-life advocates, the Obama Administration has withdrawn its attempt to force a Bible publisher to comply with the Health and Human Services (HHS) abortion pill mandate.
Obligation
The controversial mandate imposes a strict obligation on employers to provide abortion-inducing drugs as part of health care insurance, regardless of their religious or moral convictions.
Tyndale House Publishers - the world’s largest privately held Christian publisher - refused to cover the abortifacient Plan B as part of its insurance package on the grounds of conscience.
Its lawsuit said that the company was “committed to biblical principles including the belief that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God from the moment of their conception.”
Last year, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton granted an order in favour of Tyndale temporarily preventing President Obama from enforcing the mandate against it.
Pressure
Passing the ruling, the Judge said. “[The mandate] places substantial pressure on the plaintiffs to violate their beliefs.
“It places the plaintiffs in the untenable position of choosing either to violate their religious beliefs by providing coverage of the contraceptives at issue or to subject their business to the continual risk of the imposition of enormous penalties for its noncompliance.”
The administration has now asked a federal appellate court to dismiss an appeal that it had lodged against the order following the ruling.
Nervous
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represented Tyndale, said that the administration was nervous about upholding its argument that the company was not religious enough to qualify for the religious exemption.
Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman of ADF said:
“Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish. The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer. For the government to say that a Bible publisher isn’t religious is outrageous, and now the Obama administration has had to retreat in court.”
Continue
Mr Bowman said that it will continue to fight for the freedom of all family business owners to follow their consciences on the issue.
“We will continue to argue that the administration cannot disregard the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom for all family business owners and must offer a comprehensive exemption to the mandate,” he added.
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