Last year, Congress passed a law to protect pregnant women from employer discrimination, and Democrats insisted the law could not be used to force employers to provide leave for abortions.
“Under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act … the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] could not—could not—issue any regulation that requires abortion leave, nor does the act permit the EEOC to require employers to provide abortion leave in violation of state law,” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said during Senate floor debate last December before the act passed as part of a government funding measure later that month.
In August, however, the EEOC submitted a proposed rule suggesting that the agency indeed plans to force employers to foot the bill for their pregnant employees to have an abortionist kill their unborn babies.
“These regulations completely disregard legislative intent and attempt to rewrite the law by regulation,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told Politico in August. “The decision to disregard the legislative process to inject a political abortion agenda is illegal and deeply concerning.”
This regulation subverts a measure protecting pregnant women and weaponizes it against unborn babies—the very lives those women are bringing into the world.
Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to pass a law mandating that businesses offer leave for abortion. Congress did not do that. Instead, the EEOC has taken it upon itself to rewrite the law that Congress did pass in order to make it say what the law’s own supporters clearly admitted it does not.
Luckily, you can take action against this rule from the comfort of your own home, telling the EEOC that it can’t just twist the law like this.
The Biden administration is required by law to listen to the American people when it implements a major new rule or regulation.
Federal agencies open rules up for “notice and comment,” a process by which everyday citizens can weigh in on forthcoming rules and regulations. Agencies are required by law to read what you send in, and sometimes courts will cite these public comments, even if the government decides to go forward with the rule anyway.
This process works. In May, the Department of Education announced that it would delay the implementation of its new Title IX rule (forcing schools to allow male athletes to compete in women’s sports) by five months—from late May to October—because it received more than 240,000 public comments on the proposed rule.
Heritage Action for America, an independent nonprofit organization affiliated with The Heritage Foundation, had launched a portal to make it easy for Americans to make their voices heard on the women’s sports rule, and 15,440 Americans used the portal to comment. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
Heritage Action has launched another portal to help Americans register their concerns about the EEOC’s guidance twisting this law, which aims to help pregnant women, into an instrument for the killing of unborn babies. Americans have until Oct. 10 to submit public comments, and each comment must receive a written response from the EEOC. The rule cannot go into effect until all comments have been answered.
You can voice your opposition to this regulation through Heritage Action’s comment portal here.
This bureaucratic subversion of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act represents but one example of the administrative state’s tendency to undermine the clearly stated will of Congress, and in some cases the president, to advance its own agenda.
The Heritage Foundation also has helped launch a comprehensive effort to rein in the administrative state. Project 2025 aims to equip a future conservative president with the tools to make the bureaucracy more accountable to the American people.
You can learn more about that project, and get involved, at the Project 2025 website.
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