A ruling against the Trump administration and the Little Sisters of the Poor is the latest salvo in a relentless campaign to impose the “contraceptive mandate” of the Affordable Care Act over sincerely held religious and moral objections.
On Aug. 13, Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania struck down rules that exempted religious and moral objectors from the Affordable Care Act’s “contraceptive mandate,” finding them “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA. Pennsylvania v. Trump cries out for a prompt reversal on appeal.
Beetlestone did not dispute the legitimacy of the exemptions. Indeed, she couldn’t. Back in 2020, the Supreme Court, in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, upheld these very rules as a lawful exercise of the Department of Health and Human Services’ authority under the ACA. Instead, Beetlestone claimed the exemptions were not the product of “reasoned decisionmaking,” blindly following the suggestion to do so in Justice Elena Kagan’s concurring opinion.
Rather than follow Kagan’s suggestion, Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion in the case should be the guiding standard for courts and the executive alike. Alito emphasized that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, “compels an exemption for the Little Sisters and any other employer with a similar objection to what has been called the accommodation to the contraceptive mandate.”
He warned that by avoiding this question, the court would “prolong the legal battle in which the Little Sisters have now been engaged for seven years — even though during all this time no employee of the Little Sisters has come forward with an objection to the Little Sisters’ conduct.” Alito’s approach underscores three critical RFRA standards:
- Substantial burden: The mandate imposes a burden by compelling compliance with practices the Little Sisters view as complicit in gravely immoral acts.
- Compelling interest: Congress never treated contraception as a compelling interest when passing the ACA. Indeed, it declined to mandate such coverage.
- Least restrictive means: Rather than burden faith-based institutions, the government itself could directly provide contraceptive coverage, an approach that respects both conscience and access.
The executive branch is not a neutral umpire in matters of religious freedom. It has an affirmative obligation under RFRA, not to mention the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, to ensure that federal laws are not enforced in a way that compels religious believers to violate their faith.
The rules at issue in Pennsylvania v. Trump were not an indulgence granted to the devout. They were a belated course correction — a recognition that the federal government cannot demand that faith-inspired groups like the Little Sisters provide, pay for, or facilitate access to drugs and devices they believe to be gravely immoral, including those that can act as abortifacients. It respected the foundational principle that such crucial institutions must not be forced to abandon their religious convictions in order to serve the needy and vulnerable.
For more than a decade, the Little Sisters have been entangled in litigation over this mandate, first under Zubik v. Burwell, then Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania, and now yet again. They have won multiple times before the Supreme Court, only to face renewed attacks from pro-abortion state attorneys general — most prominently Pennsylvania’s now-Gov. Josh Shapiro — who insist on universal compliance with a mandate Congress never enacted.
That is worth underscoring: Congress, in passing the ACA, did not require coverage of abortion or contraception. The so-called contraceptive mandate arose not from the text of the statute, but from the rule-making pen of unelected bureaucrats. It is, in effect, a backdoor contraception policy imposed without legislative consent — precisely the sort of overreach the framers guarded against when they crafted the separation of powers.
The irony of this latest decision is that it invokes the APA’s “arbitrary and capricious” standard to dismantle a policy the Supreme Court has already said was substantively sound. The APA is meant to guard against agency caprice, not to entrench it. By using the APA as a scalpel to excise conscience protections while leaving the underlying mandate intact, the district court has facilitated the very arbitrariness it claims to oppose.
The executive’s obligation is not merely to balance competing policy goals, but to actively safeguard religious freedom. RFRA requires that any federal action substantially burdening religious exercise be the least restrictive means of advancing a compelling governmental interest. The contraceptive mandate fails this test twice over. Contraceptives are widely available through countless other avenues without forcing religious and moral objectors to participate.
The Free Exercise Clause likewise prohibits laws and regulations that target or de facto penalize religious practice. Forcing the Little Sisters to either violate their conscience or withdraw from serving the elderly poor is not neutrality — it is coercion.
The Little Sisters’ fight is a bellwether for all faith-based ministries. If nuns who dedicate their lives to caring for society’s most vulnerable can be forced to choose between their mission and their faith, no believer’s conscience is safe.
And if this latest ruling stands, it will signal to the bureaucracy that no victory for religious freedom is ever final — that every accommodation, however hard-won, can be chipped away by those determined to make orthodox belief bend to the prevailing cultural winds.
Picciotti-Bayer, a parishioner of St. John the Beloved Church in McLean, is a legal analyst for EWTN News. Reprinted with permission from the National Catholic Register.
Corpus Christi