The case settled, and on Thursday, Hellwege reappeared on the national scene: She spoke at the national press conference announcing the creation of a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division at the Department of Health and Human Services. The new office was established to hear complaints from medical professionals like Hellwege, who feel they have been pressured into providing medical services that conflict with their religious beliefs. If the office finds there was a violation, they could issue a corrective action, such as making a hospital find someone like Hellwege a different position, according to Susan Berke Fogel with the National Health Law Program.

“I hope that everyone can agree that no doctor or nurse should be denied employment or fired on account of their faith,” Hellwege said at the press event.

Roger Severino, the head of civil-rights enforcement at HHS, also made remarks at the event, saying, “the state should not force people to go against their integrated view of humanity.” He added that though there had been just 10 complaints from health-care workers related to religious beliefs during the Obama administration, there have already been 34 in the first year of the Trump presidency.

On Friday, HHS followed up by issuing a proposed rule that would affect as many as 745,000 hospitals, doctors’ offices, and nonprofits. It would require them to post notices of protections against religious discrimination on their job applications and employee manuals, and it would allow HHS to enforce protections for religious medical providers. The new rule would cost about $312.3 million in the first year alone to implement.

The ADF, the group that brought Hellwege’s lawsuit, welcomed the new measure, saying it would help the federal government protect health-care workers from being coerced to do something that violates their conscience. Kevin Theriot, the ADF’s senior counsel, pointed to new reporting requirements for health-care entities to demonstrate that they haven’t forced anyone participate in abortion or sterilization.

But reproductive-rights advocates worry the new rule could go further than past medical religious-freedom regulations, allowing almost anyone who works in the health field to refuse to provide a wide array of services. Meanwhile, it doesn’t require the religiously objecting doctors to refer patients elsewhere.

Via email, Planned Parenthood Federation of America said the rule could mean that a pharmacist could refuse to fill a prescription for birth control, a transgender patient could be denied hormone therapy, or a pediatrician could refuse to treat the child of gay parents. “Under the new rule, you could have translators who refuse to translate for a woman undergoing tubal ligation,” says Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.