In the summer, the administration finally announced its “accommodation” in the long-standing controversy over the requirement that employers’ health plans must cover all contraceptive methods, including those that can induce abortions. To many, the regulations designed for faith-based service organizations such as hospitals, schools, and charities are fraudulent: promising that the organizations can purchase health insurance that does not cover drugs and services the organizations regard as morally wrong while requiring the insurers (or third-party administrators, in the case of self-insuring organizations) to pay for those same contraceptives on behalf of the employees of those same organizations. The regulations further confirmed that the administration is willing to provide an actual exemption from the mandate only to churches, and that it insists that businesses and their owners ought to get no religious freedom protections whatsoever.

The courts may provide some relief, permitting some businesses and some religious nonprofits to entirely escape the mandate. But there is no assurance that the courts would provide such relief to all organizations, nor that such losses in court would persuade the administration to reverse or radically modify the contraceptives mandate for other organizations.

Civil disobedience by dissenting religious organizations seems impossible: insurance companies are unlikely to sell nonconforming insurance lest they lose their own license to operate.

There remains a legislative solution, the Health Care Conscience Rights Act(H.R. 940, S. 1204), which has more than 180 co-sponsors in the House and over a dozen in the Senate. To become law, this bill has to be attached to some must-pass legislation, and for that to happen, Representatives and Senators need to hear from their constituents how important it is that Congress provide a solution to the grave religious freedom problems caused by the HHS contraceptives mandate.