CV NEWS FEED // Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), this week wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal Opinion section criticizing a government agency’s “unjust and illegal” pro-abortion mandate.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has hijacked the pro-woman, pro-family Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) by adding in a regulation that, in part, requires employers to accommodate employees who want an abortion, the Archbishop wrote in the opinion article on May 28.
“In addition to shoehorning abortion into a life-affirming statute, the [EEOC] regulation effectively nullifies the new law’s protections for religious employers,” he wrote. “It also bans employers from encouraging employees to choose life instead of abortion. That means religious employers cannot require their employees to be faithful advocates of the sanctity of life.”
When the PWFA passed in 2022, the USCCB was in full support of the legislation because it expands protections for pregnant women in the workplace, according to the Archbishop.
Archbishop Broglio praised the original version of the PWFA for being pro-woman, pro-family, and pro-worker, and added that its congressional sponsors “explicitly said it couldn’t be read to include abortion.”
He noted that the text of the PWFA requires employers to offer reasonable accommodations for pregnant employees and “bars employers from denying employment opportunities to a pregnant employee because of these needs, or from taking adverse action against her.”
In April 2024, however, the EEOC issued a final ruling to add a mandate to the PWFA that forces employers to accommodate abortions.
Archbishop Broglio criticized the EEOC for “[twisting the PWFA] to undermine human dignity… In the EEOC’s telling, having an abortion is the equivalent of pregnancy or childbirth.”
When the EEOC first proposed adding in the pro-abortion mandate in August 2023, over 54,000 people and organizations sent comments to the EEOC expressing their opposition to it, according to the Archbishop.
Despite this, “[t]he commission persisted, betraying the public’s trust and transforming bipartisan legislation into a radical regulation,” Archbishop Broglio wrote.
On May 22, the religious liberty legal organization Becket Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of the USCCB against the EEOC, requesting a preliminary injunction.
Archbishop Broglio concluded, “If the EEOC’s rule is allowed to stand, the USCCB and Catholic ministries nationwide will be penalized for doing what they have done for centuries: teaching and serving the infinite dignity of every person. We will not compromise that twofold mission of walking with women and honoring the unborn. We look forward to the courts’ vindicating our right to do so.”
