Published May 26, 2026
On May 26, 2026, EPPC scholars Rachel N. Morrison and Eric Kniffin filed an amicus brief in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops v. EEOC on behalf of EPPC in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of several Catholic ministries challenging a workplace abortion-accommodation mandate. This brief follows another July 2025 brief in support of the ministries in the same case.
Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) to provide women workplace accommodation protections for “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency in charge of enforcing the PWFA, issued a rule requiring employers, like the Catholic ministries, to provide accommodations for their employees who wish to abort their unborn children.
EPPC’s brief puts the EEOC’s challenged abortion-accommodation mandate in its political context:
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion “to the people and their elected representatives.” But, as this Court recently noted, the Biden Administration responded to Dobbs by “direct[ing] federal agencies to ‘expand access to … abortion.’” Just hours after the Supreme Court released its decision, President Joe Biden announced “actions” that his administration would take to counter Dobbs. He “committed to doing everything in his power” to “protect access” to abortion. The executive branch, following Biden’s lead, sought to unilaterally (and unlawfully) expand abortion access through novel interpretations of federal laws, including the PWFA.
This brief summarizes actions that federal agencies took post-Dobbs to conveniently discover never-before-found authority to advance the Biden administration’s pro-abortion political agenda. This pattern makes it easier to see that the EEOC’s challenged abortion-accommodation mandate is not a lawful exercise of the legitimate authority delegated to it by Congress, but rather an unlawful attempt to advance policy goals that could not be accomplished through the legislative process.
The brief urged the Court to provide full relief to the Catholic ministries.
Rachel N. Morrison is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project, which advocates for an authentic understanding of the human person in the drafting, implementation, and rollback of government regulations.
