CV NEWS FEED Pro-abortion groups repeatedly cited the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ endorsement of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in order to push through the legislation’s controversial abortion provisions.
Pro-life
groups issued numerous warnings to the USCCB not to praise the PWFA, asking
them to rescind their December 2022 endorsement of the bill.
The bishops’ endorsement came after the House approved the PWFA and as the
legislation was being debated in the Senate.
CatholicVote
told the USCCB and outlined in public reports that the PWFA’s implementation
would inevitably force Catholic employers to accommodate abortions.
And as
CatholicVote reported earlier this week, that is exactly what happened after the PWFA
went into effect in July 2023:
The PWFA
has the potential to fill a void in American employment law, requiring
employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” for “limitations related to
pregnancy, childbirth, and related conditions.” To its detriment, however, the
original act left the interpretation of those terms to the Biden
administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal
agency responsible for regulating workplace discrimination laws.
As lawmakers
considered the PWFA, the nation’s leading pro-abortion organizations made use
of the bishops’ endorsement of the bill, citing it as proof that the
legislation was moderate and would not be offensive to religious voters.
The “long
overdue legislation” would merely fix “a legal loophole to ensure that
workplaces allow for basic, humane accommodations needed to have a healthy
pregnancy while holding down a job,” the pro-abortion National Partnership for
Women & Families (NPWF) argued in a December 2022 statement.
Objectors “claim that they are standing in the way of the wellbeing of nearly
three million pregnant workers in the name of religious liberty,” NPWF argued,
“a claim made even more absurd by the fact that the bill in its current form is
endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
The ACLU
made similar use of the bishops’ backing just this week. The PWFA would simply
ensure “that roughly 1 million additional workers nationwide now will enjoy the
right to reasonable accommodation,” the abortion lobbyist stated in an October 11 press release:
The
PWFA’s passage marked the culmination of a decade of advocacy by the ACLU and
its coalition partners and was enacted with broad bipartisan support, including
from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops.
Once the EEOC openly stated its intention
to use the PWFA to enforce an abortion mandate on employers in July, the
bishops appeared to recognize the mistake they had made in uncritically
supporting the bill. The USCCB quickly became a leader in calling for public
comments objecting to the attack on religious freedom.
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