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The Biden administration is withdrawing a set of proposed rules aimed at expanding access to contraception that would have made it harder for health plans and employer-sponsored insurers to exclude birth control coverage.
The move, announced late Monday in a Federal Register notice, will leave in place Trump-era rules that allow employers to cite “nonreligious moral objections” to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to cover contraception .
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies involved said the rules were being withdrawn to “focus their time and resources on matters other than finalizing these rules.”
Those were the rules at the timeproposed last year,HHS said it wanted to balance access to contraceptives against religious objections some employers may have to offering the benefit.
The law requires that all health insurance offered by the vast majority of employers cover at least one of the 18 forms of birth control approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
But the Trump administration in 2018 greatly expanded so-called conscience protections for employers, so that any entity with a religious or moral objection to contraception would not have to cover it in its sponsored health insurance plans by the employer
The rule proposed by the Biden administration would also have provided a solution to allow employees of religious organizations to obtain contraceptive services for free, directly from a willing provider or facility.
“Ensuring access to contraception at no cost is a national public health imperative,” HHS said at the time, citing the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion.
“Now more than ever, access to and coverage of birth control is critical as the Biden-Harris Administration works to help ensure women everywhere can get the contraception they need, when they need it HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a 2023 statement.
