WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a lower court to take a second look at a religious challenge to a New York state requirement that employers provide health care plans that include abortion coverage.
The justices said the case should be reviewed again in light of their ruling last week that Wisconsin had unlawfully denied charitable groups associated with the Catholic Church from a state tax.
In separate action on Monday, the court also took up a case from New Jersey arising from the state’s investigation of anti-abortion pregnancy centers that provide guidance to pregnant women. The technical issue is whether the state can enforce subpoenas against First Choice Women’s Resource Centers Inc., which runs five centers, seeking information about donors.
First Choice says the subpoena violates its free speech rights and freedom of association under the Constitution’s First Amendment.
The New York case revolves around a regulation issued by New York in 2017 that requires employer-provided health insurance plans to include abortion coverage in certain situations, including in cases of rape and incest.
It includes a religious exemption that applies to institutions but does not extend to religious-affiliated groups that serve the general public, such as those that provide food to low-income people.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany and other organizations sued, saying the exemption is so narrow it violates the Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion. In addition to Catholic entities, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Baptist groups are also among the challengers.
Lawyers for the religious groups say that, based on recent Supreme Court rulings, narrowly drawn religious exemptions can be just as problematic as no exemption at all. They argue that the justices should overturn the 1990 precedent, a case called Employment Division v. Smith.
The New York case has been litigated for years and already reached the Supreme Court once. Then, the justices ordered the state court to revisit an earlier ruling against the diocese.
That followed a 2021 Supreme Court ruling on the same legal question which the justices ruled in favor of a Catholic Church-affiliated group in Philadelphia that was barred from participating in the city’s foster care program because of its opposition to same-sex relationships.
In another case with some overlap, the Supreme Court in 2020 endorsed a broad religious exemption to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for birth control.
In a May 2024 ruling, the New York Court of Appeals again ruled for the state, saying that neither the regulation nor the religious exemption violated the Free Exercise Clause.
The state’s lawyers argued in court papers that the religious exemption “provides a denominationally neutral accommodation” based on objective criteria. As such, the measure — since codified into law by the state legislature — is a “generally applicable” law under the Supreme Court’s 1990 precedent, they wrote.
