Tag: Birth Control

The Story: In recent days, several celebrities made well-known by their participation in the Bachelor/Bachelorette television franchise have publicly praised Natural Cycles, a fertility awareness...

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Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., responded by invoking The Handmaid's Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel, now a Hulu series, set in a patriarchal dystopia where the government controls women's bodies and forbids them to read, write or work outside the home. Lowey is not the only critic of the new regulations who conflates freedom from coercion with a right to forcibly extracted subsidies. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said letting the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom trump a "neutral, generally applicable law" such as Oregon's peyote ban would create "a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself." That decision rejected the approach that the Court had taken in earlier cases, which required the government to justify substantial burdens on religious freedom by showing that they were the least restrictive means of serving a compelling state interest. The peyote ruling provoked strong criticism from across the political spectrum and inspired the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Congress passed nearly unanimously in 1993. Although the Court ruled in 1997 that RFRA cannot be constitutionally applied to state and local laws, it is still binding on the federal government, and it was the main basis for legal challenges to the contraceptive mandate. The American Civil Liberties Union, which immediately filed a lawsuit against the new, broader religious exemption, supported RFRA. The organization's birth control lawsuit, which argues that the new rules "give employers license to discriminate against women," does not even mention RFRA. The ACLU claims the new birth control regulations let businesses, nonprofit organizations and universities "impose their religious beliefs on their employees and students." They are trying to avoid the government's imposition of a legal obligation that violates their religious beliefs.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey says Trump is at war with women after a rollback the Affordable Care Act's mandate on contraception coverage. Healey joins Ari Melber to explain the two reasons why she sued the administration. Neera Tanden also…

The one year anniversary of Donald Trump's infamous Access Hollywood tape release coincides with the Trump administration rolling back birth control provisions. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination for in-depth analysis of daily headlines, insightful…

The White House and Department of Health and Human Services say they will broaden rules to let more employers deny birth control coverage for religious or moral reasons. NBC’s Peter Alexander reports. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is…