Suit was filed last month in a Louisiana federal district court by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic University of America and two Louisiana Catholic dioceses challenging rules adopted in April of this year by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The Act requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation for employees in connection with pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. At issue in the recent lawsuit is the EEOC's inclusion of abortion as a related medical condition. The complaint (full text) in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (WD LA, filed 5/22/2024) alleges in part:
The PWFA is not an abortion accommodation mandate. Rather, it fills a gap in federal employment law by ensuring pregnant women receive workplace accommodations to protect their pregnancies and their preborn children. Plaintiff United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) enthusiastically supported the law’s bipartisan passage. That support reflected the PWFA’s uncontroversial and laudable purpose, which is fully consistent with the Catholic Church’s belief that all human life is imbued with innate dignity and its goal of ensuring a fairer workplace for women. But EEOC has now shoehorned a mandate that employers across the country knowingly support abortion into a statute explicitly designed to protect the health and safety of preborn babies and their mothers.
Worse, at the same time that it expands federal law into fraught areas, EEOC also insists on nullifying the explicit religious exemption that Congress wrote into the PWFA. In the PWFA, Congress imported Title VII’s religious exemption, which expressly allows employers to make employment decisions based on sincere religious beliefs. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000gg-5(b). Of course, since the PWFA concerns only pregnancy in the workplace, this makes clear that Congress meant to allow religious exemptions from pregnancy-accommodation claims. Yet now EEOC claims the exemption bars only religious discrimination claims—which aren’t authorized by the PWFA in the first place. That renders the exception a nullity, protecting employers from PWFA claims that don’t exist.
National Review yesterday reported on the lawsuit.
