Supreme Court: Emergency Contraception Stays in Obamacare
Supreme Court: Emergency Contraception Stays in Obamacare
This doesn’t answer the overall legal question but it does prevent blocking until it does get decided by a higher court.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied a request to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.
Hobby Lobby Stores and a sister company, Mardel Inc., sued the government, claiming the mandate violates the religious beliefs of its owners.
In an opinion issued Wednesday, Sotomayor said the stores fail to satisfy the demanding legal standard for blocking the requirement on an emergency basis.
The kind of remedy the Hobby Lobby and its owners had sought — an injunction pending appeal — can only be issued if it is necessary to protect the Supreme Court’s authority to rule ultimately on the constitutional challenge, or if the challengers’ right to such a remedy is clear without a doubt, Justice Sotomayor noted. She stressed that she was not ruling on whether the constitutional challenge ultimately would succeed, and noted that the Court had not previously ruled on whether constitutional or other legal protection for religious rights is available for closely held, for-profit corporations and their controlling shareholder when they object as an expression of their faith to mandatory employee benefits.