The National Women’s Law Center, with our partners the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, SisterLove, Inc., law firm Lowenstein Sandler, and 50 other organizations, filed a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2020 in opposition to two Trump-Pence administration rules that would allow virtually any employer or university claiming a religious or moral objection to exempt themselves from the ACA birth control benefit and deny insurance coverage of birth control to employees, students, and their dependents. Those rules are temporarily blocked by two federal courts, but the Trump-Pence administration has appealed all the way to the Supreme Court to try to get those orders overturned. NWLC and its partners previously filed versions of this brief to the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Third, and Ninth Circuits, as well as to federal district courts in Pennsylvania and California. NWLC and its partners also filed a similar version of the brief in a separate case, DeOtte v. Azar, challenging the ACA birth control benefit in a federal court in Texas, and again on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Using personal stories and statistics, the brief explains to the Supreme Court the harmful impact the Trump-Pence rules would have if allowed to go into effect, particularly on Black, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander women and other people of color, young people, people with limited resources, transgender men and gender non-conforming people, immigrants, people with limited English proficiency, survivors of sexual and interpersonal violence, and others who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. The brief also addresses the faulty assumptions and misleading data the Administration has put forward as justification for the rules, citing empirical research, data, and stories demonstrating that the Administration’s claims are false and put peoples’ health, autonomy, economic security, and equality at risk.