PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill Friday that relaxes Arizona's requirement for health plans to cover contraception, legislation that supporters called a protection for religious freedom and that critics called an attack on women.
Under the measure, employers that formally identify themselves as religiously oriented organizations will be able to drop contraception coverage for birth control purposes. They'd still have to provide it for other medical reasons. The bill also affects coverage for abortion-inducing drugs.
"In its final form, this bill is about nothing more than preserving the religious freedom to which we are all constitutionally entitled," Brewer said in a statement. "Mandating that a religious institution provide a service in direct contradiction with its faith would represent an obvious encroachment upon the First Amendment. With this common sense bill, we can ensure that Arizona women have access to the health services they need and religious institutions have their faith and freedom protected."
The bill stirred months of debate in the Republican-led Legislature, both for its potential impact on women's health coverage and privacy concerns.
"This is only the latest of the numerous bills the governor has signed that restrict women's access to preventive health care, taking personal medical decisions away from women and handing them over to politicians," said Bryan Howard, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona.
Argument over the Arizona bill echoed national debate about religious freedom and birth control that was sparked after the Obama administration required employers to provide contraception coverage under the federal health care overhaul.
Supporters of the legislation sought to loosen a decade-old state law that generally requires employers' health plans to cover contraception. That current law allows churches to opt out of providing coverage for contraception for birth control purposes.
As originally proposed in the Legislature, the bill would have allowed any employer to opt out due to religious objections.
However, in a change made to win votes for passage, the bill's final version gave the opt-out only to religiously oriented organizations.
Those include church-affiliated hospitals and charities, though some critics of the legislation say other employers also could qualify merely by changing their business records.
Lawmakers also changed the bill to specify that employers opting out of coverage for birth control could not make workers tell employers the workers' other medical reasons for using contraception.
