What sort of bullies pick on the Little Sisters of the Poor?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 17, 2025

The Little Sisters of the Poor have appealed a federal court’s decision that would require them to offer coverage for contraception and abortion in health-care plans for their employees.

Upon reading the sentence above, you might double-check the date, and ask, “Didn’t the Little Sisters of the Poor already win that case? Didn’t the Supreme Court rule in their favor?”

Yes, the Supreme Court did find in favor of the Little Sisters— twice, in fact. Yet here they are, facing yet another legal challenge. The exact legal ground for these cases have varied, but the same fundamental issue is at stake: Can the government require a religious employer to violate its moral principles?

In 2011, when the federal government announced that the health-care plans required under Obamacare must include contraceptive coverage, the Little Sisters challenged that ruling, saying that the federal regulations would violate their religious freedom. They won that case, after a long and expensive legal battle, when the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the government regulations must protect employers’ religious freedoms.

But the opponents of religious freedom did not give up easily. They brought a new case, challenging the exemptions that Uncle Sam had provided for religious employers, and that case too wound its way—slowly, expensively—to the Supreme Court, where once again the Little Sisters were vindicated.

Still the battle was not over. In January the attorneys general of thirteen states (plus the District of Columbia), filed yet another lawsuit challenging the exemptions. Meanwhile New Jersey and Pennsylvania concocted new rules that would have required religious employers to provide the contraceptive coverage. In August a federal judge in Pennsylvania advanced that case, finding that the exemptions offered by the Trump administration to protect religious freedom were “arbitrary and capricious,” and ordering a nationwide injunction on the use of those exemptions. It is this latest order that the Little Sisters are now appealing.

If any aspect of this marathon legal argument is “arbitrary and capricious,” surely it is the bloody-minded determination of the political Left to enforce its will on a charitable institution like the Little Sisters of the Poor. Since the Obamacare mandates were put in place, exactly zero employees of the Little Sisters have complained about an inability to find contraceptive coverage. In court arguments, the lawyers arguing against the religious exemptions have openly admitted that women who want contraceptives can readily obtain them without requiring support from their employers’ health-care plan. So no one’s “right” to contraception has been violated to date, and there is no likelihood that such a right will be violated in the near future. What, then, can explain the urgency with which state attorneys general are pursuing their case—even risking the negative publicity that it brings? No sensible politician should be willing to risk being portrayed as the oppressor of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Yet leading politicians have taken exactly that stand.

Fortunately the Little Sisters have not been forced to pay all their own legal bills—which, by now, would have been sufficient to close down all their charitable works. The Beckett Fund, a religious-liberty advocate, has taken the case for them. Still the relentless jihad against the Little Sisters is shocking. (The cases against the Little Sisters have been funded by the taxpayers.) Mark Rienzi, the president of the Beckett Fund, is right to say: “The fourteen-year legal crusade against the Little Sisters has been needless, grotesque, and un-American.”

In all likelihood the Little Sisters will win this latest legal battle. The Supreme Court has already shown its strong inclination to back the religious exemptions. Maybe, if the case comes before them again, the Justices can find a way to signal to the lower courts that their decision is final, and their patience with spurious challenges is exhausted. If not, we can probably expect some enterprising lawyer to discover one may legal technicality on which an appeal can be launched, and the patient suffering of the Little Sisters will continue.

But even if they win a final, sweeping victory, the crusade against the Little Sisters should be a warning to any Americans who might dare to challenge the political power and legal clout of the forces that back abortion and contraception. This case is ample proof that even if the contraceptive industry cannot ultimately defeat you in court, as long as they can find sympathetic attorneys general to bring their cases, and sympathetic federal judges to give them preliminary injunctions, they can make your life miserable for years. You might fight and win, but the fight could bankrupt you. The liberal forces will keep coming after you, organized in waves, funded by the taxpayers. If you doubt how aggressive the contraceptive lobby can be, bear in mind that they have picked a fight—quite literally, and quite unnecessarily—with the Little Sisters of the Poor.