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A divided Supreme Court appeared to hand a major victory to President Trump and the religious right Wednesday when it ruled that the administration could, in fact, undermine the mandate that employer-provided health insurance plans cover birth control for women with no out-of-pocket costs. But the ruling appears to give the next president the power quickly to reverse much of Trump’s initiative. And in the meantime, it left the door open for proponents to keep fighting on behalf of contraceptive coverage for all female employees. (Jon Healey, 7/8)

The Supreme Court bolstered its standing as a defender of religious liberty with two decisions Wednesday vindicating that ideal. One of them, Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, presents a particularly poignant story that fortunately has a happy ending.F or seven years, the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Roman Catholic nuns that homes for the elderly poor all over the world, have found themselves fighting in the courts against the government’s efforts to force them to comply with ObamaCare’s contraceptive mandate. (Frank Scaturro, 7/9)

Well, that didn’t take long. Only days after surprising the nation by striking down a strict anti-abortion law in Louisiana, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Americans once again that it is no friend to reproductive rights, or to the vast majority of women who will use some form of birth control in their lifetime. In a decision Wednesday, the justices dealt another blow to the birth control mandate under the Affordable Care Act. In the wake of the 7-to-2 ruling in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, “between 70,500 and 126,400 women would immediately lose access to no-cost contraceptive services,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her dissent, citing a government estimate. (7/8)

The Supreme Court just gave its blessing to a wide range of companies refusing to offer their female employees health insurance that covers birth control, even when they could do so without compromising their religious or moral beliefs. The losers in Wednesday’s decision are the millions of women whom Congress intended to protect through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which requires new insurance policies to cover preventive healthcare services with no out-of-pocket costs. (7/9)

Given that more than two-thirds of Americans believe, in principle at least, that private health insurance plans should cover contraception, it’s strange that we can’t seem to settle the matter. You would think a functioning democracy could work this issue out in a reasonable way that respected the rights of women as well as the rights of those with religious objections to contraception.Instead, the question of whether health plans issued under the Affordable Care Act should cover birth control has been the subject of an ongoing, maximalist culture war. The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday will make things worse. (E.J. Dionne Jr., 7/8)

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gave a green light to the Trump administration's rules allowing employers to deny their employees insurance coverage for birth control on moral or religious grounds. Unfortunately, that's no surprise. The Republican Party has long opposed the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act, requiring coverage for birth control, and Republican leaders including President Trump have made it a priority to stack federal courts with judges hostile to social progress and ready to assert control over the bodies of women. (llyse Hogue, 7/8)