A Win for Freedom of Conscience

President Donald Trump announced new reforms that would broaden conscience exemptions to the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, expanding protections beyond small and closely held businesses to publicly traded companies and other employers as well as extending protections not only to those with religious objections but to those with moral objections that are not specifically religious in nature. This is an excellent development: The overbearing contraception mandate was an assault not only on religious liberty but on the legal standing of private conscience itself. (The mandate included types of contraception that, as even the Obama administration's FDA acknowledged, might instead operate post-conception to prevent implantation and thus kill the early embryo.)