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A Female Judge Just Blocked Trump's Attempt to Rescind the Birth Control Mandate

For a lot of women—particularly those of child-bearing age—one of the best parts of former President Barack Obama‘s Affordable Care Act is the fact that employers are required to offer free birth control to employees through their health insurance policies. Keeping in mind the high cost of the Pill, IUDs, and other forms of contraception, the news that they would now be totally covered came as a huge breath of fresh air, reducing stress for women worried about how they’d scrape together another $100 for next month’s Pill pack or dissuaded by the cost of longer-term options—even if those ultimately worked better for them. (Reminder: There is no one-size-fits-all option for contraception.)

The one type of employer currently excluded from this mandate are religious organizations. However, President Donald Trump, via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, attempted to undo the entire requirement by issuing a change in policy in October—until a female judge on Friday put a temporary stop to it.

Word that Trump would try to undo Obama’s birth control mandate has been floating around since the end of May, when Vox got a leaked document saying that all employers—not just religious organizations—would be able to apply for a religious or moral exemption. Trump administration lawyers say that the change in policy protects “a narrow class of sincere religious and moral objectors from being forced to facilitate practices that conflict with their beliefs.”

Luckily, a federal judge in Pennsylvania stopped Trump’s attempt in its tracks by issuing an injunction on Friday that orders the administration not to enforce the change in policy. Appointed by Obama, the judge, Wendy Beetlestone, wrote in her ruling that Trump’s rules “conjured up a world where a government entity is empowered to impose its own version of morality on each one of us. That cannot be right.”

The downside is that her injunction is only temporary, but the upside is that for now, our free birth control is safe.

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A Federal Judge Just Blocked Donald Trump's Transgender Military Ban

In an order-by-tweet that caught many people—including some preeminent members of the Department of Defense—by surprise, President Donald Trump announced in July that transgender men and women would no longer be allowed to serve in the military, reversing an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender recruits to openly serve.

Now, a federal judge has blocked parts of Trump’s proposed ban saying that transgender service members who have brought litigation forward against Trump “have established that they will be injured by these directives, due both to the inherent inequality they impose, and the risk of discharge and denial of accession that they engender.”

After introducing the ban on Twitter, Trump handed down an official directive outlining the policy in late August. Under his proposal, transgender recruits would be banned from the military, medical treatment funding for current transgender troops would be completely cut off, and Defense Secretary James Mattis would have power to expel transgender service members. In late August, Mattis put a temporary freeze on the ban when he announced that he would wait to put the policy into effect until a team of experts completed a study determining the effects it would have on current service members.

In a ruling handed down on Monday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked parts of Trump’s ban related to “accession and retention.” In short, the aspects of Trump’s proposal that affected the recruitment and retention of transgender troops were struck down by Kollar-Kotelly’s decision. She did not, however, offer a ruling on the directive prohibiting funding for “sex reassignment surgical procedures,” saying that her court does not have jurisdiction over that aspect of the ban.

With Kollar-Kotelly’s decision, the military will now “revert to the status quo” in regard to transgender service members—meaning former President Obama’s serve-openly policy will live on.

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