By Daniel Payne
CNA Staff, Aug 13, 2025 /
16:25 pm
A federal court has ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor in their long-running legal dispute over government contraception mandates, dealing a blow to the religious order of sisters even after multiple court victories, including at the Supreme Court.
The legal advocacy group Becket said on Aug. 13 that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of both New Jersey and Pennsylvania in finding that the federal government had not followed protocol when issuing exemptions to contraceptive requirements, including for the Little Sisters.
The district court said that a set of religious exemptions granted by the federal government during the first Trump administration were “arbitrary [and] capricious” and failed to adhere to the requirements of the federal Administrative Procedure Act.
The court has vacated those exemptions “in their entirety,” the Aug. 13 ruling said.
Diana Thomson, a senior attorney with Becket, told CNA that the case is the same one that saw the Little Sisters win a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 when a majority of the court’s justices said the exemptions to the contraceptive mandate were legal.
She described the procedural questions in the Aug. 13 ruling as “cutting-floor arguments” that the states had largely ignored several years ago.
“Instead of dropping the case, Pennsylvania and New Jersey revitalized their cutting-floor arguments that they chose not to pursue at the Supreme Court last time and brought them in the district court,” she said.
The district court accepted those arguments “even though the Supreme Court already blessed the rules,” Thomson said.
The court is “trying to find a loophole” to the 2020 Supreme Court ruling, she said.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania had brought the lawsuit against multiple federal agencies and officials, though the Little Sisters of the Poor were attached to the lawsuit as “defendant-intervenors.”
The sisters will appeal the ruling, Thomson said.
“I assume the Trump administration will appeal also,” she said. “But the Little Sisters’ appeal is already on file.”
“We will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to,” she said.
In a separate statement, Mark Rienzi, the president of Becket and the lead attorney for the Little Sisters, said it was “bad enough that the district court issued a nationwide ruling invalidating federal religious conscience rules.”
“But even worse is that the district court simply ducked the glaring constitutional issues in this case after waiting five years and not even holding a hearing,” he argued.
“It is absurd to think the Little Sisters might need yet another trip to the Supreme Court to end what has now been more than a dozen years of litigation over the same issue,” he said, adding: “We will fight as far as we need to fight to protect the Little Sisters’ right to care for the elderly in peace.”
(Story continues below)
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Daniel Payne is a senior editor at Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at the College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.
