A judge in Louisiana and Mississippi stops a federal law mandating employers to provide time off to women seeking abortions.

TFD – A federal judge has blocked the enforcement of a new EEOC rule requiring businesses to provide leave for elective abortions in Louisiana and Mississippi. This ruling comes as a significant pushback against the regulation, citing the agency’s overreach in jurisdiction.

A new federal law requiring businesses to provide workers seeking elective abortions with time off to acquire and recuperate from the operation was halted by a judge in two Southern states.

In a ruling dated Monday, US District Judge David C. Joseph partially suspended the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s new rule, stating that the agency had gone beyond its jurisdiction as granted by Congress in presenting the regulation. While the states’ legal challenge to the regulation is being handled, Joseph has prevented the agency from implementing the rule in Louisiana and Mississippi, even though it is scheduled to go into effect on Tuesday. Additionally, Joseph’s order stops the rule from being applied to four Catholic organizations that filed a separate complaint.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, passed by Congress in 2022 as part of a larger spending package, mandates that workplaces provide certain accommodations for pregnant employees “related to the pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” The EEOC laid out the regulation under this act.

Joseph, a former presidential appointee, stated in his opinion that “if Congress had intended to mandate that employers accommodate elective abortions under the PWFA, it would have spoken clearly when enacting the statute, particularly given the enormous social, religious, and political importance of the abortion issue in our nation at this time (and, indeed, over the past 50 years).

Terminations of pregnancy or abortions stemming from the underlying treatment of a medical condition related to pregnancy,” according to the judge, are exempt from the provisional injunction.

The order on Monday follows a decision made on Friday by a federal court in Arkansas, who dismissed a challenge to the new abortion law that was filed by 16 other states and Arkansas. Obama-appointed US District Judge D.P. Marshall Jr., the court in that case, ruled that the states lacked standing to file the complaint and referenced a ruling from the Supreme Court last week in a significant case challenging access to abortion pills.