A federal judge has canceled a Joe Biden-era rule that required businesses to promote abortion.
The rule, perpetrated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Biden, demanded that employers provide abortion-related leave and other practices that violated the beliefs of a multitude of business operators and owners.
A report in the Washington Stand explained the impact of the ruling from Daniel Traynor, a Trump appointee to the District Court of North Dakota, is that 9,000 Catholic businesses now do not have to grant abortion leave and other practices contrary to their beliefs.
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The EEOC under Biden, who promoted abortion in a multitude of ways throughout his presidency, had issued rules creating a new meaning to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act so that abortion was promoted.
“The actual language of the PWFA requires protections for ‘pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions,'” the report explained. Biden expanded that to say, “current pregnancy, past pregnancy, potential pregnancy, lactation (including breastfeeding and pumping), use of birth control, menstruation, infertility and fertility treatments, endometriosis, miscarriage, stillbirth, or having or choosing not to have an abortion, among other conditions.”
The report said that move “effectively reversed the pro-life effect of the law, and the explicit inclusion of fertility treatments also ran afoul of the religious convictions of some Catholics.”
The challenge was brought by the Catholic Diocese of Bismarck and the Catholic Benefits Association representing 9,000 Catholic businesses. They charged it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Traynor granted a preliminary injunction last year and now has made that permanent.
In his ruling, he concluded, “The CBA is likely to succeed on the merits of the RFRA violation claim because the law forces members to choose between expressing sincerely held beliefs and compliance. This harm is irreparable and upholding constitutional rights always weighs in favor of the public interest and an injunction. The agency should have known it would not be allowed to force individuals to violate sincerely held religious beliefs.”
Other cases also had challenged Biden’s agenda.
The Washington Stand commented, “The entire scenario serves as a reminder of the Biden administration’s troubling record of anti-Catholic bias. As ironic as it may seem, political appointees of the nation’s second Catholic president distorted the meaning of a pro-life law to require employers to subsidize abortion and other practices objectionable to Catholics. These actions were not only lawless but fruitless, as they provoked Catholics to challenge the rule in court, where they easily won. But what else could we expect from an administration whose suspicion of Catholics ran so deep that they installed undercover agents in Catholic parishes to spy on their worship services?”
LifeNews Note: This column originally appeared at WorldNetDaily.
