Perhaps the most famous example of the government persecuting Catholic religious sisters in recent memory is the years-long fight involving the Little Sisters of the Poor. For years, the nation watched as government officials attempted to use Obamacare mandates to force the Sisters to offer contraceptives and abortifacients in their health plans.
While such legal situations are terrible to behold, there is at least a consistency in the enforcement of the (unjust) law in question. The Little Sisters of the Poor was not targeted by the law: The secular leftist orthodoxy demands that all employers cover contraceptives and abortifacients for employees. There is a similar consistency in cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative — the laws are not targeting religious belief or practice in particular. Rather, they reveal how governments are creating policies based on a false understanding of life and the human person and then imposing them on everyone. No exceptions. Not even for nuns.
But it is a separate issue when state governments are emboldened enough to pass laws that explicitly single out pro-life religious persons or organizations. Last year, the Sisters of Life (and with them all pro-life pregnancy centers in the state of New York) became the latest victims of targeted legal attacks from a hostile state government.
In 2022, New York enacted a series of state laws to protect and promote abortion in response to the coming Dobbs decision. Among other troubling pro-abortion measures, the law attempted to give the New York health commissioner
