Sioux Center, Iowa — Earlier this week, a federal district court issued an order that halts the enforcement of the 2011 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services –or HHS — mandate against Dordt College in Sioux Center.
Beginning in 2011, HHS required employers to provide insurance coverage for services and products including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization.
Dr. Erik Hoekstra, president of Dordt says that while the case was about health care coverage, Dordt took this journey “to assert our contention about religious expression more generally, believing that if we allowed government to over-assert in this area now, any future over-assertions in other areas would be more difficult to defend without this result.”
Dordt officials say that last year, HHS allowed nonprofits such as Dordt to not adhere to the mandate, but federal courts in Pennsylvania and California later blocked the new rules nationwide. Through the action taken this week by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, Dordt (and Cornerstone University in Michigan) no longer need to comply with the mandate.
Dr. Hoekstra says that this final resolution provides Dordt with the continued freedom the school has always enjoyed—specifically, “to decide on the basis of our deeply-held religious beliefs the type and scope of covered services within the health plan we offer to our employees.”
