Catholic businesses may not be forced to subsidize abortions or fertility treatments, ruled federal Judge Daniel Traynor, a Trump appointee to the District Court of North Dakota, on Tuesday. Traynor granted 9,000 Catholic businesses a permanent injunction against an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rule requiring employers to provide abortion-related leave and other practices contrary to these businesses’ religious beliefs.

In 2023, the EEOC under President Biden issued new regulations effectively rewriting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) to include abortion. The actual language of the PWFA requires protections for “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” The EEOC rule dramatically expanded this language to include “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 inclusion of abortion 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.

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Last year, the Catholic Diocese of Bismarck and the Catholic Benefits Association (CBA), which represents 9,000 Catholic businesses, challenged the EEOC rule in federal court, claiming that it violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). On September 23, Judge Traynor granted these groups a preliminary injunction, halting EEOC’s enforcement of the rule against them while the lawsuit proceeded.

“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,” he wrote. “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.”

On Tuesday, Traynor replaced the preliminary injunction with a permanent injunction, finding that the facts and evidence in the case had not changed since his previous ruling.

The controversial EEOC has become mired in multiple lawsuits. Last April, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general challenged the constitutionality of the rule. “Unelected commissioners at the EEOC seek to hijack these new protections for pregnancies by requiring employers to accommodate elective abortions — something the Act clearly did not authorize,” they declared. “The EEOC’s rule constitutes an unconstitutional federal overreach that infringes on existing state laws and exceeds the scope of the agency’s authority.”

In June, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana also granted a preliminary injunction in a separate lawsuit brought by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other Catholic groups.

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?

This is not even the first time that the Biden administration’s EEOC lost a health care-related court case to a Catholic group in North Dakota (that may seem overly specific, but the truth is often weirder than fiction). In 2023, the Eighth Circuit affirmed a district court ruling that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the EEOC could not interpret “antidiscrimination laws in a way that compels [religious entities] to perform and provide insurance coverage for gender transitions.” After the adverse ruling (Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra), the Biden administration Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to appeal the matter further.

“It is a precarious time for people of religious faith in America. It has been described as a post-Christian age,” Traynor warned. “One indication of this dire assessment may be the repeated illegal and unconstitutional administrative actions against one of the founding principles of our country, the free exercise of religion.”

For their part, North Dakota Catholics are just happy to preserve their free exercise of religion. “The Court has upheld our religious freedom rights and that is all we ever wanted,” said Bismarck Bishop David Kagan.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview. Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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