The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Women’s Law Center, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, announced the lawsuits against the government on a call with Planned Parenthood and Attorney General of California Xavier Becerra.
All organizations said they would attempt to file their suits today. They all plan to challenge the administrations’ rules allowing employers with “religious” or “moral” objections to drop birth control coverage, as forms of gender discrimination and violations of the separation of church and state.
“With these actions, [the Trump administration] is saying to employers, ‘If you want to discriminate the administration has your back,'” Fatima Goss Graves, President & CEO, National Women’s Law Center said. “We will see them in court.”
Becerra did not fully commit to filing a lawsuit on behalf of the state of California, but warned that the state was ready to do so.
“We’re prepared to act, including in court, and we’ll do it swiftly,” Becerra said on the call. He added that he was “in conversation with a number of states” about filing lawsuits together and separately, and that they would “make an announcement in an appropriate time.”
Shortly after this, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy announced that Massachusetts would be filing a lawsuits against the Trump administration over the rules.
The advocacy groups who plan to begin filing today hinted at arguments they could use in their lawsuits, including the a-typical way that the Trump administration rolled out the new rules and prior Supreme Court decisions surrounding Obamacare’s contraception mandate.