GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Cornerstone University is suing the federal government over a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers with health insurance plans to provide birth control, according to a letter from university President Joseph Stowell.

The Christian liberal arts university already covers some forms of birth control, but Stowell argues it’s unconstitutional to require Cornerstone to provide “access to drugs that can induce abortions.”

"This filing is first and foremost an effort to preserve and protect our religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment,” he wrote. “Given our conviction that life begins at conception and our commitment to the sanctity of life, we find the mandate to provide our faculty, staff and students with insurance that provides access to abortion-inducing prescriptions unacceptable.”

Cornerstone is jointly filing the suite with Dordt College, a Christian liberal arts school in Sioux Center, Iowa. The lawsuit is to be filed in Iowa.

The Affordable Care Act requires all employers – religious or not – to provide employees with free contraceptive coverage, including the morning-after pill and sterilization. Cornerstone's insurance provider currently does not offer the morning-after pill.

Federal rules finalized in June don't require religious colleges to "pay for or promote access to employees' or students' birth control coverage," according to a story from Inside Higher Ed.

But employees and students at religious schools will still be able to “get birth control fully covered by insurance with no co-pay, because insurance companies or third-party administrators will be required to pay for that coverage separately,” the story said.

Cornerstone is represented in the lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian legal-advocacy group. The university says Alliance “will bear all of the legal costs related to this litigation.”

“If the government can force Christian colleges like these to act contrary to their own deeply-held religious convictions, then the government can do just about anything,” Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance, said in Cornerstone’s letter announcing the lawsuit. “The government should not coerce any American in this manner.”

A question and answer sheet describing Cornerstone's lawsuit said other religious colleges have also filed lawsuits over the birth control mandate. Among them: Wheaton College, University of Notre Dame, Geneva College.

In his letter, Stowell wrote that the birth control provision in the Affordable Care Act is an example of the government infringing on Cornerstone’s beliefs.

“In our view, the government should not be able to force us to buy or provide insurance that gives access to objectionable drugs, devices and services that violate our institutional convictions."

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