A federal judge in Eugene ruled Wednesday the nonprofit Oregon Right to Life does not have to abide by a 2017 state law that requires most private health insurance plans to pay for abortion and contraception.
U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai previously held the state law violated the advocacy group’s First Amendment right to religious freedom.
Oregon Right to Life had sought a broad injunction from Kasubhai that would have prevented the state from enforcing the law against all other employers with similar objections. Kasubhai disagreed, writing in Wednesday’s order that the more appropriate step was to grant narrow legal relief aimed at the group’s particular circumstances.
“The Court declines to grant relief to ‘all other employers’ with similar objections,” Kasubhai wrote.
Oregon’s law, known as the Reproductive Health Equity Act or RHEA, ran afoul of the more expansive view of religious rights the nation’s highest court has taken in recent years.
Speaking to OPB before the judge’s order, Oregon Right to Life president Lois Anderson said the legal issues at stake in the case were critical to the group’s members.
“It’s a philosophical issue of being able to live out your beliefs,” Anderson said. “The spirit and the main understanding of the First Amendment is that our religious beliefs are not inside of church walls.”
While the ruling allows Oregon Right to Life to be treated as a religious employer, it doesn’t change abortion, contraception and other insurance plan requirements for other employers.
“Oregonians’ right to access reproductive healthcare without interference has not changed, and this is not a green light for other employers to deny their workers reproductive care coverage,” Attorney General Dan Rayfield, whose office defended the state’s law, said in a statement Thursday.
“This ruling is about one employer with a singular, religiously based mission opposing abortion.”
A ‘religious employers’ exemption
At issue in the case was the law’s narrowly written religious exemption.
It allowed insurers to issue plans without abortion or contraception only to “religious employers.”
Under the definition laid out in the law, employers who primarily serve people of the same faith and whose purpose is instilling religious values, like churches or religious orders, were considered exempt. Religious organizations with broader missions were not.
The law also included a grandfather clause that allowed Providence, a Catholic health system and an economic force in the state, to continue to offer health insurance plans without abortion coverage.
Oregon Right to Life didn’t qualify as a “religious employer” under the law.
The organization purchased coverage from the Providence Health Plan for its 10 employees — a plan that excluded abortion except in very limited circumstances, but did pay for contraception.
In 2023, Oregon Right to Life sued. It argued that the state was violating its right to religious freedom by forcing it to purchase a plan that included birth control methods it opposed, and by making it impossible for it to seek coverage from insurers other than Providence.
The group is not explicitly religious and doesn’t require its members to profess faith, but it argued that its anti-abortion advocacy was rooted in deeply held Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Initially, the case was dismissed by a different federal judge citing doubt as to whether Oregon Right to Life’s beliefs were genuinely religious.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit restored the case, finding the group’s position on abortion and contraception qualified as sincerely held religious beliefs.
The appeals court sent the case back to the district court to be reconsidered in light of a 2025 unanimous Supreme Court decision that affirmed states’ obligation to treat all religious employers equally. That case held that a Catholic charity in Wisconsin was entitled to the same tax exemption as other religious groups, even though the charity didn’t proselytize and served people of all faiths.
Scope of the ruling
While the ruling is a legal victory for Oregon Right to Life, a number of factors may blunt its reach.
The RHEA law only applies to private insurance plans and plans sold on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Self-funded health insurance plans — where employers shoulder the full cost of care for their employees — are subject to federal, not state, regulation.
Before the ruling, which was limited in scope to Oregon Right to Life, Anderson suggested there may be a few other organizations, like crisis pregnancy centers, that may seek their own exemptions.
A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Justice stressed that Kasubhai’s ruling was narrow “and did not find the law unconstitutional on its face or as to any other employer.”
The state has the option to appeal the ruling, but that may be unlikely given its limited scope and volume of litigation Oregon is currently engaged in with the Trump administration.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.