A chair for a ticket booth operator who is six-months pregnant. A bottle of water for an expectant shift worker. An extra restroom break for a pregnant cashier on her feet all day.
Congress recently passed a new law, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, to ensure that every pregnant woman receives fair, reasonable job accommodations to keep her and her unborn child healthy and safe while she remains in the workforce. It was a transformational, bipartisan, pro-woman law to ensure employers reasonably accommodate pregnancies, childbirth, and related conditions.
What the law did not include was a right to an abortion.
Yet the Biden administration has illegally hijacked this law as its latest vehicle to try and impose an abortion mandate on the American people. Recently, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proposed new regulations for implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to require virtually every employer in the country, even pro-life and religious Americans who recognize that life begins at conception, to facilitate abortion.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act requires every employer in America to “reasonably accommodate” a worker’s “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” The administration is now proposing that “related medical conditions” include “termination of pregnancy, including via … abortion.” This new mandate would require employers with more than 15 employees to create “reasonable accommodations” for their workers’ elective abortions, even if doing so violates their pro-life or religious beliefs.
But Congress sought to protect pregnant workers, not force employers to facilitate abortions.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the value of unborn lives in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Alliance Defending Freedom has tracked the administration’s effort to find every possible avenue to advance a pro-abortion agenda, even if doing so is illegal and grossly exceeds the authority of the executive branch. From trying to require pharmacies that accept Medicaid patients to dispense abortion-inducing drugs, to forcing emergency room doctors to perform and complete abortions, to creating a 50-state online mail-order chemical abortion drug economy.
This emboldened pro-abortion activists to call on the administration, through the EEOC, to read into the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act an abortion mandate on employers across the country, requiring them to “accommodate” an employee’s elective abortion, regardless of state laws protecting unborn life or employers’ pro-life positions or religious beliefs.
The EEOC’s new mandate requires employers, for example, to give women extra time off from work to make it possible for them to obtain abortions, even if state law prohibits intentionally assisting women in obtaining abortions — and even if the state is the woman’s employer.
Pro-life and religious employers have the right to live and speak the truth about the sanctity of life — the importance of caring for unborn children and their mothers. But the Biden administration has refused to craft any exemptions in the text of its new abortion regulations.
Whether to impose an abortion mandate on virtually every employer in America is a major question that only Congress can tackle through the democratic process. The Supreme Court thus would require the administration to show clear language in the text of the act giving them authority to impose this mandate. None exists. Congress did not put abortion anywhere in the text of the law, so there is no legal authority for any new federal regulations regarding abortion. Indeed, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), the chief sponsor of the bill, promised that the law did not authorize any “regulation that requires abortion leave.”
The proposed rule was published on August 11, kicking off a 60-day period for Americans to let their voices be heard. What they should tell the administration is that it doesn’t have the legal authority to smuggle an abortion mandate into a pro-woman, pro-life law. It’s unlawful for the executive branch to continue weaponizing the administrative process to advance a radical pro-abortion agenda.
Julie Marie Blake serves as senior counsel for regulatory litigation at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.