WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration announced a new rule that will force employers to cover abortion under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), trampling upon religious liberty and conscience rights and furthering the White House’s aggressive abortion agenda.
On Monday, April 15, Biden’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced the “Implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.” The rule is over 400 pages and set to be published Friday, April 19.
According to the summary of the Act, the government will require “a covered entity to provide reasonable accommodations to a qualified employee’s or applicant’s known limitations related to, affected by, or arising out of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation will cause an undue hardship on the operation of the business of the covered entity.”
The rule includes abortion and contraception expressly among the things it deems qualify for coverage by employers, mentioning the word “abortion” 348 times.
Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Julie Marie Blake also condemned the new rule for imposing “pro-abortion regulations on virtually every employer in the country, even those whose religious beliefs dictate that life begins at conception.”
In a statement, Blake said, “This rule is just the latest example of the Biden administration abusing its power to advance abortion. The new rule seeks to punish the speech of pro-life employers and restrict their hiring practices. The Biden administration and the EEOC don’t have the legal authority to smuggle this illegitimate rule into a law that was created to protect and support women and that had nothing to do with abortion.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Virginia Fox of Virginia, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce chairwoman, denounced the rule for stretching the application of the Pregnant Workers Act to include abortion.
In a statement, she declared, “Adding this controversial provision into the PWFA is wrong. Period. Abortion is not a medical condition related to pregnancy; it is the opposite. Leave it to the Biden administration to think terminating a pregnancy and ending the life of an unborn child addresses the needs of pregnant workers.”
“This rule also goes well beyond EEOC’s authority,” she continued.
The PWFA was intended to ensure employers provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant employees. The PWFA does not apply to abortions. The term ‘abortion’ is not once mentioned in the law. Instead of following congressional intent, the Biden administration is using the regulatory process to advance radical policy goals. This isn’t surprising given the administration’s predilection for abusing the Constitution.
The cherry on top, it is overly broad and unreasonable, causing chaos and confusion for workers and employers. Job creators who are already struggling under Bidenomics could be forced to provide years of federally mandated leave under this rule. It’s nonsensical. Bottom line, this is a classic example of government bureaucrats royally mucking it up.
In an October 10 letter to EEOC chair Charlotte Burrows obtained by the Daily Signal, Reps. Foxx and Mary Miller of Illinois warned that the then-proposed rule the administration is implementing contains language defining “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” as encompassing “having or choosing not to have an abortion.”
As laid out in the letter, the PWFA does not include abortion in its text, and the lawmakers who enacted it said they did so with the express understanding that it did not confer any requirement to facilitate, assist, or accommodate a decision to abort.
In 2022, Catholic Vote warned that if passed, the PWFA would allow pro-life groups to be “sued if they don’t provide their employees special leave to get abortions,” as LifeSiteNews reported. “The EEOC does not typically act in a way that aligns with pro-life or Catholic views. In general, the EEOC has interpreted ‘pregnancy-related’ discrimination issues to include protecting workers’ ‘right’ to abortion,” Catholic Vote’s Erika Ahern noted at the time.
Nevertheless, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) supported the PWFA legislation – and the EEOC mentioned this very support when introducing the proposed pro-abortion regulations implementing the now-passed law. The USCCB supported the legislation alongside Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion company.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky previously expressed concerns about PWFA, warning before its passage that “the bill could force religious employers to provide accommodations that arise from an abortion, which could violate the free exercise of their religious beliefs,” which is precisely what the administration is now doing.
The new rule the latest move by the federal government under Biden being mobilized into a multi-front effort to make abortion as practical as possible after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing the elected branches of government to directly ban abortion for the first time in half a century.
Biden, who boasts that his administration has launched a “launched a whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights” (a popular euphemism for legal abortion on demand), has called on Congress to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, which would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws. The 2024 elections will determine whether Democrats retain the White House and keep or gain enough seats in Congress to make that happen.