A federal judge killed a controversial Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rule and guidance on Wednesday that both required employers to provide paid leave and other accommodations to employees seeking abortion and restricted their ability to take adverse employment actions against employees’ who demanded such accommodations.
U.S. District Judge David Joseph of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, ruled that the EEOC “exceeded its statutory authority” when implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and, “in doing so, both unlawfully expropriated the authority of Congress and encroached upon the sovereignty of the Plaintiff States [Louisiana and Mississippi] under basic principles of federalism.”
The ruling was in response to consolidated litigation.
The first case was brought by the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, both of which passed near-total abortion bans in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, on May 13, 2024. The states argued that the Biden regulation violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution.
The second case was filed later that month by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic University of America, and two Catholic dioceses. The plaintiffs argued that the rule not only exceeded congressional authority but required them to knowingly violate their sincerely held beliefs about the “moral evil” of abortion by abetting their employees’ efforts to kill their unborn children.
Timothy Broglio, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, noted in an op-ed last May that the original PWFA passed in 2022 was cause for celebration as its “purpose was laudable and obvious: to expand protections for pregnant women in the workplace.”
‘States have many legitimate interests in regulating abortion, including “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development.”‘
Broglio noted, however, that the Biden EEOC “subverted the law’s noble goal by turning it into an abortion-accommodation mandate. That is unjust and illegal.”
Louisiana and Mississippi similarly suggested the PWFA had been hijacked, noting the Biden EEOC’s “Final Rule not only runs roughshod over the PWFA’s text, but also runs afoul of Dobbs.”
“There, the Supreme Court expressly recognized that the States have many legitimate interests in regulating abortion, including ‘respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development,’” the states said in their original complaint. “But the Final Rule contravenes Dobbs by requiring the Plaintiff States to accommodate the very types of abortions that they have chosen, in their sovereign capacities, to proscribe — or else face federal lawsuits for money damages and injunctive relief.”
In June, Judge Joseph consolidated the cases and enjoined the EEOC from enforcing its abortion mandate against the Catholic plaintiffs as well as employers located in the two red states.
Joseph torpedoed the abortion accommodation and ordered that any implementing regulations or guidance requiring or suggesting to employees that they are required to provide employees with accommodation for purely elective abortions “are also hereby VACATED and immediately without effect.”
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill celebrated the ruling, calling it a “win for Louisiana and for life!”
“This court’s decision to deny workers reasonable accommodations for abortion-related needs is part of a broader attack on women’s rights and reproductive freedom,” said Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a liberal activist group that previously opposed President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and championed the passage of the regulation. “This court’s sudden decision to rewrite those regulations upends workers’ and employers’ understanding of and reliance on settled precedent.”
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