Court: Hobby Lobby Must Provide Morning-After Pill

A federal judge on Monday denied a legal challenge to President Barack Obama's signature heath reforms, ruling that the owners of arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby must provide emergency contraceptives in their group health care plan, Reuters reports. The Christian owners of Hobby Lobby asked to be exempted from providing the "morning-after" and "week-after" pills on religious grounds, arguing that it would violate their belief that abortion is wrong. But judge Joe Heaton of the U.S. District for the Western District of Oklahoma denied the request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that while individual members of the family that owns and operates Hobby Lobby have religious rights, the companies the family owns are secular, for-profit enterprises that do not possess the same rights. Hobby Lobby is the largest non-Catholic U.S. company to go to court over the issue of the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare. There are more than 40 other lawsuits challenging the mandate that requires all group health plans to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.