The draft regulation, obtained by Vox, is dated May 23, and “would significantly overhaul the birth control mandate as it had been implemented by the Obama administration,” write Dylan Scott and Sarah Kliff.

They note that it “would allow any employer to request an exemption based on moral or religious objections. This would widen the exemption to apply to any company from a small, religiously affiliated business to a large, publicly traded company. ”

The company would not have to notify the government if it was seeking an exemption, Vox adds.

The Guardian writes that Trump laid the groundwork for rolling back the mandate early this month when he signed an executive order directing his administration “to address conscience-based objections” to preventive care for women.

At the 4 May signing ceremony, in the White House rose garden, he singled out for special praise the Little Sisters of the Poor. The group, a religious order of nuns, was the face of the legal challenge to the contraception mandate before the supreme court.

“With this executive order, we are ending the attacks on your religious liberty,” Trump said……..

Calling the proposed rule “broad-based, appalling, and discriminatory,” Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), said it threatens to take away access to no-cost birth control coverage for hundreds of thousands of women.

“Giving permission to employers and insurance companies for their religious or moral beliefs to override women’s access to basic healthcare, which is critical to their economic security, is a license to discriminate and an affront to all women,” Borchelt said.

The Center, ACLU, and NWLC vowed to fight the effort in court.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License