The White House is standing by the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate after the Supreme Court blocked the requirement that a religiously affiliated organization provide contraception coverage in its health insurance plan.
“We defer to the Department of Justice on litigation matters, but remain confident that our final rules strike the balance of providing women with free contraceptive coverage while preventing non-profit religious employers with religious objections to contraceptive coverage from having to contract, arrange, pay, or refer for such coverage,” a White House official told Politico on Wednesday.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an order late Tuesday that temporarily blocked implementation of the contraception coverage requirement for a Denver-based organization of Catholic nuns, hours before the provision was to go into effect on New Year’s Day.
