The Arizona Senate will soon vote on a bill, HB 2625, to allow employers to deny women contraception coverage if providing it would conflict with their religious beliefs. The state House already passed the bill, and it cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday.
The bill doesn’t just aim to implement a Blunt Amendment-type law at the state level — it would also strike a protection from the books that forbids a religious employer from firing “an employee who independently chooses to obtain insurance coverage or prescriptions for contraceptives from another source.” That means that if women sought coverage outside of her employer plan, she could be fired, although that might conflict with other laws in Arizona that would protect women from such employer actions.
