A federal judge has sided with Mississippi Attorney GeneralLynn Fitch and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill issuing a preliminary injunction against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC)attempt to hijack the protections of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. In May, the Attorneys General filed the complaint against the EEOC and theirattempt to impose a national abortion regime.
“The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is an important measure to supportwomen in the workplace when they are pregnant and following childbirth. It isa shame that the Biden Administration is shortchanging the needs of workingwomen in its single-minded drive to undo the Dobbs opinion and overrule theright of the people to make decisions about abortion policy. We appreciate thecourt’s thoughtful opinion and look forward to working toward acommonsense implementation of the Act, which would accommodate pregnantwomen while respecting state laws to protect life,” said Attorney GeneralLynn Fitch.“The District Court applied a common sense interpretation of the plain wordsof the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. When this law was debated, members ofCongress uniformly agreed it did not apply to abortion.
The Biden Administration continues to re-write laws in ways Congress never intended,which violates the United States Constitution. We are grateful the DistrictCourt blocked the rule. I would specifically like to thank the hard work of mySolicitor General Ben Aguinaga and his team for their continued dedicationand hard work defending Louisiana and the Constitution,” said AttorneyGeneral Liz Murrill.In their suit, the Attorneys General explain how the Pregnant Workers FairnessAct fills a gap between the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or relatedmedical conditions; the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requiresemployers to offer affirmative accommodations to workers experiencingqualifying disabilities; and the Family and Medical Leave Act, which providesunpaid extended leave for a serious health condition, such as pregnancy orchildbirth, for qualified employees.“If Congress had intended to mandate that employers accommodate electiveabortions under the PWFA, it would have spoken clearly when enacting thestatute, particularly given the enormous social, religious, and politicalimportance of the abortion issue in our nation at this time (and, indeed, overthe past 50 years). The Court is therefore not persuaded, on the record beforeit, that Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted the EEOC theauthority to interpret the scope of the PWFA in a way that imposes anationwide mandate on both public and private employers – irrespective ofapplicable abortion-related state laws enacted in the wake of Dobbs – toprovide workplace accommodation for the elective abortions of employees,”Judge David Joseph wrote in his order, granting the preliminary injunction.During debate on the law, Senator Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) specificallyrejected the position the EEOC has embraced in this rule when he stated,“under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the [EEOC] could not – could not –issue any regulation that requires abortion leave, nor does the act permit theEEOC to require employers to provide abortions in violation of State law.”
The new law was supported by a broad coalition of organizations, includingpro-life groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which stated thatthe law would advance its “goal of ensuring that no woman ever feels forced tochoose between her future and the life of her child while protecting theconscience rights and religious freedoms of employers.” The Conference ofCatholic Bishops also sought and received an injunction.
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