[JURIST] The American Civil Liberties of Northern California [advocacy website] filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF] Friday against the Department of Health and Human Services [official website] (HHS) for allowing religious agencies taking in refugees to refuse female immigrant minors access to reproductive health services, including abortions and birth control. The ACLU contends that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), through HHS, has approved grants to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and other groups with similarly held religious or pro-life beliefs, and allowed these organizations “to refuse on religious grounds to provide information about, access to, or referrals for contraception and abortion, even if the young person in their care has been raped.” These organizations have also be allowed to remove young women seeking these services from their current shelter. This infringement upon the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment [materials], the ACLU contends, serves to deny these young women their constitutionally guaranteed right to health and reproductive health services, and relocation of those seeking these services to other facilities only serves to “unfairly stigmatize [these women] for choosing to terminate the pregnancy, and uproot [them] from the support network” at their original facility. The complaint provides several examples of young migrant women who faced difficulties in obtaining these services. The ACLU requests a permanent injunction on the ORR to make sure that HSA and TVPRA grants given for providing refugee relocation services are not provided to organizations imposing religious-based restrictions.

Religious objection to reproductive health care [JURIST backgrounder] has been a highly-contested issue in the US. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), insurance companies and employers have been forced to cover the cost of contraceptives and reproductive health care. Passage of the ACA was followed by a series of lawsuits by religious groups, including a Supreme Court decision [JURIST report] that closely held for-profit corporations can deny coverage of contraception costs because of their religious beliefs. Abortion [JURIST backgrounder] has also been a contentious issue, leading to a slew of state-government restrictions [JURIST report] on access to abortions.