The Biden administration announced a new rule Monday which aims to force employers to cover abortion under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA).
The administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed the over 400-page rule titled “Implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act” on Monday morning. The rule’s publication is scheduled for April 19.
According to the rule’s summary, it 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 lengthy rule mentions the word “abortion” a total of 348 times.
House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-NC, slammed the new rule stating, “Adding this controversial provision into the PWFA is wrong. Period.”
“Abortion is not a medical condition related to pregnancy; it is the opposite,” continued Foxx. “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.”
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“This rule also goes well beyond EEOC’s authority,” the congresswoman 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,” Foxx added. “Bottom line, this is a classic example of government bureaucrats royally mucking it up.”
Also on Monday, pro-religious freedom legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) noted that the rule would “impose pro-abortion regulations on virtually every employer in the country, even those whose religious beliefs dictate that life begins at conception.”
“This rule is just the latest example of the Biden administration abusing its power to advance abortion,” argued ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake.
Blake stated that the 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,” Blake added.
President Biden signed the PWFA into law in December 2022 as part of an omnibus spending package. The House passed the legislation over a year earlier in May 2021, by a bipartisan 315-101 vote.
Then, all voting Democratic members of Congress supported the bill. Republicans, on the other hand, split almost evenly – with 99 voting for the act and 101 voting against it.
Foxx, a Catholic, was one of the lawmakers who had opposed the legislation.
Pro-abortion Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, first introduced the PWFA back in 2012 – a decade before it became law.
In November 2022, one month before Biden signed the legislation, CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern highlighted some of the PWFA’s shortcomings specifically relevant to pro-life Catholics.
“While [the PWFA] offers many of the protections Catholics and their allies have always wanted for pregnant mothers, there is a dark underbelly to the bill that must be addressed before we can accept it as a real solution,” Ahern wrote in a piece titled “Do Better.”
The bill is stand-alone legislation that deliberately fails to incorporate Civil Rights Act (CRA) religious-organization protections. In fact, it includes no provisions for religious organizations. This is important, because in the current legal system and culture at large “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” includes both contraception and abortion.
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
