A federal appeals court with a long reputation as the most liberal in America pulled the rug out from a Seattle-area church that wanted to exclude abortion from its health plan on religious grounds, first reinstating its lawsuit against Washington's no-exceptions abortion insurance mandate, then tossing it nearly four years later after full legal discovery.

Cedar Park Assembly of God wants its rug back. 

It asked the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case following a divided three-judge panel's ruling last month that Cedar Park "failed to establish causation" – that the law is responsible for its inability to get an abortion-free plan comparable to the one it had, and that striking it down as a free-exercise infringement would solve its problem.

Unless the full appeals court overturns the Democratic nominees who ruled against Cedar Park – one of whom upheld California's ban on religious gatherings during COVID-19 lockdowns as a district judge – "the courthouse doors are barred to churches that have no way of vindicating their constitutional rights," the petition for rehearing says.

Their decision, over the dissent of Republican nominee Consuelo Callahan, is "unprecedented and gravely wrong," violating nearly 30 rulings between the Supreme Court and 9th Circuit and creating a split on legal standing with three circuits, including the SCOTUS stepping-stone D.C. Circuit, according to the petition filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom.

At the same time, the Trump administration is pulling the rug out from abortion providers and stabilizing pro-life states that refuse to refer women for abortion.

Last week it reinstated Title X family planning funds to Oklahoma and Tennessee pulled by the Biden administration, which sparked a Supreme Court challenge three months before President Trump's inauguration, and "temporarily withheld" tens of millions of dollars from Planned Parenthood affiliates for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

Neither pro-life states nor stateside conscientious objectors have it as bad as U.K. pro-lifers.

Livia Tossici-Bolt was convicted of violating a "public spaces protection order" (PSPO) last week and ordered to pay £20,000 for her own prosecution for refusing to pay a fine based on holding a sign near an abortion clinic that read "Here to talk, if you want."

Her lawyers at ADF International said the same judge forced client Adam Smith-Connor to pay £9,000 in prosecution costs for silently praying for his aborted son near a clinic, which officers deemed "acts of disapproval." Vice President JD Vance invoked Smith-Connor's case in his February speech accusing Europe of acting like Soviet Russia.

The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, & Labor said after the verdict that Senior Advisor Sam Samson recently met with Tossici-Bolt in the U.K. and it is "monitoring her case. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression."

The verdicts are out of whack with then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman's public letter to police in September 2023 reminding them "silent prayer, by itself, is not unlawful," and of a court decision in February exonerating March for Life U.K. Director Isabel Vaughan-Spruce.

Police twice interrogated and fined Vaughan-Spruce, in late 2023 and early 2024, for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in a PSPO, telling her to pray for unborn children somewhere else. She told them about the exoneration and police declined to prosecute her in September 2023 after a six-month investigation. 

Court not allowed to say 'beliefs are wrong'

Cedar Park's six-year-old case has already ping-ponged twice between federal district court, which twice ruled against the church, and the 9th Circuit, with the second panel's majority ruling that Cedar Park met its burden to "allege [legal] standing at the pleading stage" in 2021 but not to "demonstrate standing at the summary judgment stage" last week.

At oral argument last summer, Washington state heavily relied on the Supreme Court's reversal of a preliminary injunction against several federal agencies and officials in June for "coerc[ing] or significantly encourag[ing]" tech platforms to suppress content, as well as SCOTUS refusing to block the Food and Drug Administration's expansion of access to an abortion pill.

Democratic nominees Susan Gruber and Lucy Koh repeated its claim that nothing in the Parity Act "prevents any insurance company" from offering a plan that "excludes direct coverage for abortion services" and that "Washington’s statutes and implementing regulation enable insurance carriers to provide exactly the sort of coverage" Cedar Park "requires."

Republican nominee Callahan protested that the law makes it impossible to "exclude" abortion coverage from the church's "plan" because insurers must still pay for abortions and the insurance commissioner lets them "pass along to employers the cost of abortion coverage mandated by the Parity Act," which the state conceded could implicate the church.

The law forces it to "facilitate access to abortion coverage simply by entering into a contract with an insurer," and Cedar Park lost its abortion-free health plan from Kaiser Permanente due to the law and "cannot procure a comparable replacement," Callahan wrote.

Judges Gruber and Koh "attempted to divide Cedar Park’s conscience harms based on direct (injury) versus indirect (no injury) abortion coverage," when "one is enough," and its "focus on theoretical injuries" violates the same case law, the church's rehearing petition says.

Its First Amendment conscience rights "endured whether the abortion coverage came directly from the employer … or indirectly through an insurer" under the Hobby Lobby and Zubik SCOTUS precedents," meaning "the majority’s purported distinction is irrelevant."

The Democratic nominees not only rejected "spiritual harm" as injury, which the First Amendment is "primarily aimed at protecting," but minimized the fact that "Cedar Park has been forced to pay for direct abortion coverage for over five years," the petition says.

By claiming that its argument about facilitating abortion was "tenuous" or "attenuated," the majority actually meant Cedar Park's "beliefs are wrong," explicitly violating Hobby Lobby, which limits courts to evaluating whether the objection "reflects an honest conviction," it says.

Much like the censored doctors in the legal challenge to the Biden administration's unrelenting pressure on tech platforms to suppress disfavored narratives, Cedar Park argues insurers don't have a real choice on whether to offer abortion-free plans. 

Prior rulings make that "causation in third-party regulation cases depends 'on the predictable effect of Government action on the decisions of third parties,'" but the Democratic nominees "never engaged this inquiry [sic]," the church said. "This conflict is egregious."

Kaiser did not make an "independent business decision" but rather "responded to SB 6219's text" and told the church that's why it was scrapping the abortion-free plan, the petition says. 

This is especially galling given that the law "allows exemptions for secular reasons, because the law’s object and practical effect is to force religious holdouts (like Cedar Park and Seattle’s Jesuit) to include abortion coverage in their health plans," the church said.