Notre Dame Pulls Contraceptive Coverage Following New Trump Administration Rule

And several students are fighting back in a lawsuit.

The campus at the University of Notre DameCamilla Zenz/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The University of Notre Dame announced last Friday that it plans to stop providing no-cost birth control in health insurance plans for employees and students. The move comes as a result of changes earlier this month by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services that weakened the Affordable Care Act’s mandate requiring employers to provide free birth control.

In emails reported Tuesday by the South Bend Tribunethe Catholic university’s human resources department informed staff and students that coverage for employees will end on January 1, 2018. Students’ coverage through Aetna student health will continue through August 14, 2018, which is the end of the current plan year.

With approximately 10,500 undergraduate and graduate students, Notre Dame sued the Obama administration in 2013 over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, claiming that requiring the Catholic school to provide contraceptive coverage violated the university’s religious beliefs. The Obama administration soon permitted religious employers to file paperwork with the government indicating their religious objection to contraceptive coverage. This government notification triggered separate no-cost contraceptive coverage for employees provided directly by the insurance company and paid for by the government. Since then, university staff and students have received contraceptive coverage through a third party provider.

For years, the case wound its way through the courts as part of nationwide litigation challenging the contraceptive mandate. But following major changes to the contraceptive mandate, enacted by the Trump administration on October 6, Notre Dame settled its lawsuit. The changes expanded the types of employers that can opt out of birth control coverage and eliminated the requirement that employers notify the government to enable third-party contraceptive coverage.

In its email, the university said that it will continue covering contraceptives “when there is an appropriate medical necessity as shown by a treating physician. The use of the medication must be for treating a specific medical condition and not as a means of preventing pregnancy,” according to the Tribune. The contraceptive prescriptions that are covered will be subject to standard medication co-pays. 

Also on Tuesday, three Notre Dame students sued the Trump administration over the changes to the contraceptive mandate that have enabled the university to opt out of covering birth control.

“Blocking access to basic health care that 99 percent of women use at some point in their lives is unlawful, discriminatory and harmful,” said Fatima Goss Graves, the president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, one of the groups representing the Notre Dame students. “Everyone deserves birth control coverage, no matter where they work, how they are insured, or where they go to school. Our lawsuit aims to shut down this latest assault by President Trump on women’s health, equality, and economic security.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate