Civil & Human Rights

Late in the afternoon on New Year's Eve, the US Supreme Court quietly dropped a small bombshell regarding the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. 

Just before presiding over the Times Square countdown on New Year’s Eve, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a temporary injunction to a handful of Catholic nonprofit groups, including the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged. They say that the Obama administration’s accommodation on birth control coverage still violates their religious liberty. Sotomayor asked the government to respond by Friday. After that, the Justice, who oversees the circuit where the case was first filed, will either issue a further ruling herself or refer it to the full court. 

The decision applies only to the organizations in question and doesn’t affect the broader contraceptive coverage regulations in the Affordable Care Act, which have already gone into effect for millions of American women. But it may signal that the broader court is receptive to arguments that filling out a form for an employee to get birth control directly from an insurer is a substantial burden on religion. 

Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the lead attorney on the case, told msnbc of his clients, “They’re saying, ‘I can’t fill out permission slips for abortion, sterilization or contraception under any circumstances.’” (The mandate does not cover abortion, but some Catholic and evangelical groups have contended that the scientifically undocumented possibility the IUD and emergency contraception will disrupt the implantation of a fertilized egg is the same as abortion.) 

I had not planned to do any blogging over the holidays but then there was this whitehot-rage-inducing item in the news today:

Marlise Munoz, 33, is in serious condition in the intensive care unit at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, hospital officials said. She is unconscious and on a ventilator, her husband told CNN affiliate WFAA, but she wouldn't have wanted her life sustained by a machine.

"We talked about it. We're both paramedics," he told WFAA. "We've seen things out in the field. We both knew that we both didn't want to be on life support."

Complicating an already difficult situation is that Munoz is also pregnant, about 18 weeks along, WFAA reported. Texas state law prohibits withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes.