In Cedar Park Assembly of God of Kirkland, Washington v. Kuderer, (9th Cir., Sept. 14, 2026), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision (with opinions spanning 110 pages) held that Washington's Reproductive Parity Act taken together with its conscience protection law creates a neutral and generally applicable requirement as to health insurance coverage which survives a claim that the laws violate Cedar Park Church's free exercise rights. Taken together, the two laws require employee health insurance to cover abortions and contraceptives but allow employers who oppose abortion to furnish employees a policy under which the insurer, or the state health department, pays for abortion and contraception coverage. The court said in part:
... Plaintiff argues that, even if the challenged laws do not require it to purchase abortion coverage, the laws have prevented it from obtaining an abortion-excluding group health plan that is “comparable” to the one that it had before the Parity Act took effect....
But Plaintiff does not point to any evidence refuting the fact that, in 2019 and 2020, a different health carrier, Cigna, offered to sell Plaintiff a fully insured group health plan that excluded direct coverage for abortion....
Nevertheless, Plaintiff asserts that the conscience statute “allows carriers to force houses of worship—like [Plaintiff]—to pay for nominally ‘excluded’ abortion coverage.” Plaintiff’s argument goes like this: Under the conscience statute, carriers cannot deny enrollees in Plaintiff’s health plan “coverage of, and timely access to, any service or services excluded” from Plaintiff’s “benefits package,” ...
But section 4 of the conscience statute states that “[n]othing in [the statute] requires a health carrier, health care facility, or health care provider to provide any health care services without appropriate payment of premium or fee.” ...Plaintiff contends that section 4 “empowers carriers to pass along the cost of covering abortion and [objectionable contraceptives] to houses of worship in the form of increased premiums, ‘administrative’ or ‘overhead’ expenses, or other fictitious costs.”
Plaintiff’s conjecture is premised on a plainly erroneous and ungrammatical reading of section 4 ...
The question remains whether the challenged laws coerce Plaintiff into “facilitating access to” abortion services in violation of its religious beliefs....
Plaintiff’s belief that Providence’s plans are religiously permissible undercuts each of the three theories that Plaintiff advances, and on which the dissenting opinion relies, to assert that the challenged laws coerce Plaintiff into facilitating access to abortion, even without any indirect payment for coverage.... Plaintiff’s first theory of burden-via-facilitation posits that the challenged laws burden Plaintiff’s religious practice because Plaintiff’s purchase of a health plan is a but-for cause of its employees having access to covered abortion services....
Plaintiff’s second theory—that the challenged laws would coerce it into facilitating access to abortion under Cigna’s abortion-excluding plan because Plaintiff’s employees would use the same insurance card both for covered services and for services excluded from the plan—falls apart quickly....
Plaintiff’s third and final theory—that the challenged laws would coerce it into facilitating access to abortion because the carrier of an abortion-excluding plan would provide notice to enrollees about how to obtain access to covered abortion services outside the plan—fails for a similar reason....
Because the challenged laws are neutral and generally applicable, rational basis review applies, and we “must” uphold the laws if they are “rationally related to a legitimate governmental purpose.”...
Plaintiff does not contest that the challenged laws “easily satisf[y] that forgiving standard.”
Judge Callahan's 47-page dissent says in part:
The Parity Act burdens Cedar Park’s exercise of religion. It does so by effectively placing religiously coercive conditions upon a State-controlled privilege: the ability to procure a State-approved group health plan....
The problem with the majority’s position is that it fails to recognize the core distinction between Cedar Park’s former Kaiser plan and any Parity Act-compliant health plan that Cedar Park could obtain... —even if the plans are financially comparable, the new plan under the Parity Act must still provide plan enrollees with access to abortion services.... As far as Cedar Park is concerned, this basic fact—that no Parity Act-compliant plan can actually exclude abortion coverage—makes any Parity Act-compliant plan that Cedar Park could purchase insufficiently comparable to its prior Kaiser plan....
The record strongly suggests that the law operates as a counter to federal regulations that expanded employers’ religious exemptions from paying for or facilitating abortion services in their group health care plans. In my view, the evidence at minimum raises a serious dispute as to that question, making summary judgment inappropriate. And while Washington’s overt motivation may not have been specifically hostile towards religion, that does not necessarily make the Parity Act neutral towards religion....
In addition to its lack of neutrality, the Parity Act is not generally applicable and therefore requires strict scrutiny review for this reason as well....
