Under the guise of protecting religious freedom and moral sensibilities, the Trump administration is making it harder for women to get access to birth control. On Friday, it rolled back an Obama-era rule requiring most employers to provide their employees with birth control coverage without co-payments. The mandate, established under the Affordable Care Act, has helped millions of women avoid unwanted pregnancy by eliminating out-of-pockets costs for contraception.

Under new rules, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor will make it easier for employers to deny contraception coverage if they have a “religious or moral objection” to doing so. Further, the departments have made it harder for women who are denied birth control coverage to get no-cost contraception directly from insurance companies, under a process established by the previous administration.

If that were not bad enough, officials made the changes effective immediately. The administration claimed, absurdly, that the rule had to be issued quickly because the normal process of seeking public comment before acting would be “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” It used other specious arguments to justify its decision — asserting, for instance, that coverage of contraception could lead to more “risky sexual behavior” among some teenagers and young women.

These regulatory rollbacks will almost surely reverse years of progress. The percentage of reproductive-age women who faced out-of-pocket costs for oral contraceptives, for example, fell to less than 4 percent by 2014 from more than 20 percent just two years earlier, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. One study estimates that women are saving about $1.4 billion on the pill. The mandate to cover birth control is also very popular; 68 percent of people say they support it.