From The Los Angeles Times:
"Adopting one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation, California on Tuesday barred religious and other personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren, a move that could affect tens of thousands of students and sets up a potential court battle with opponents of immunization."
From MSNBC:
"By October, the highest court...may also decide to take a sequel to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the 2013 case in which the court struck down a regulation requiring employers to cover certain contraceptives and ruled that closely held for-profit corporations can opt out of certain laws with which they have religious objections. Religious nonprofits say the Obama administration’s opt-out form itself violates their religious consciences, although without disagreement in the lower courts, there is arguably less urgency there."
Georgia’s broad “conscience clauses” are under renewed scrutiny due to reports that a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for a drug some abortion opponents don’t like. According to Brittany Cartrett, a Walmart pharmacy blocked her prescription for Misoprostol. Cartrett needed the drug to manage a natural miscarriage, but it is also often prescribed to induce medical abortions.
“She [the pharmacist] looks at my name and she says oh, well…I couldn’t think of a valid reason why you would need this prescription,” Cartrett wrote in a post on her personal Facebook page. Although she and her physician confirmed that the drug had been prescribed for a miscarriage, not an induced abortion, the pharmacist reportedly would not relent and told her, “I don't feel like there is a reason why you would need it, so we refused to fill it.”
A D.C.-based coalition of organizations that oppose legal abortion has announced it will not obey the city’s Reproductive Health Anti-Discrimination Act (RHNDA). In a letter released yesterday, the groups called RHNDA “unprecedented and illegal” and said they “will continue to resist” the law.
RHNDA, passed earlier last year by the D.C. City Council, prohibits employers from firing employees based on their reproductive health-care choices. That includes the use of contraception and fertility technologies, like in-vitro fertilization, in addition to abortion. It also protects employees who become pregnant outside wedlock, an act still considered sinful by many religious groups.
