CVS Health fires nurse over her anti-abortion stance, lawsuit says

A nurse practitioner from northern Virginia is suing CVS Health, alleging she was fired for refusing to provide abortion-inducing drugs at the retailer's MinuteClinic medical facilities. 

Paige Casey is asking for $100,000 in damages, including back pay, according to the suit, which was filed Wednesday in Prince William County Circuit Court.

In the lawsuit, Paige Casey said CVS had for years granted her a religious accommodation that allowed her to opt out of prescribing or providing the drugs and certain contraceptives without incident. The pharmacy chain changed its policy last year, Casey said, and has stopped providing the accommodation.

Casey, who had worked for MinuteClinics since 2018, appealed to the company and said her Catholic faith teaches her that life begins at conception and she could not provide care in violation of that principle. Casey was told by a supervisor in late March that her religious beliefs would no longer be accommodated and was fired April 1, the lawsuit states.

Casey is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal group that champions conservative causes. ADF said Virginia law bars employers from taking disciplinary action against employees who object to abortion on religious grounds.

"Every American should have the freedom to operate according to their ethical and religious beliefs," ADF lawyer Kevin Theriot said.

Michael DeAngelis, a spokesman for Rhode Island-based CVS, the largest retail pharmacy in the country, said the company tries to accommodate religious beliefs, but said providing sexual health services is a core part of working at its MinuteClinic walk-in clinics.

"It is not possible ... to grant an accommodation that exempts an employee from performing the essential functions of their job," DeAngelis said in a statement. "We cannot grant exemptions from these essential MinuteClinic functions."

While businesses have long grappled with religious claims by individual employees exempting them from a particular work requirement, the issue has taken on a new salience after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

Since then, 11 states have passed near-total bans on abortion services, including Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. In Virginia, abortion is legal until the second trimester, or around 26 weeks.

In July, the Department of Health and Human Services directed retail pharmacies that they have an "obligation to ensure access to comprehensive reproductive health care services." That same month, Walgreens came under fire after a patient said a pharmacist refused to fill her birth control prescription because of religious beliefs.

Theriot said there is very little case law under the Virginia statute, in part because "very rarely do corporations just come out and fire somebody because of their religious convictions." But he said most states provide similar protections, and federal law provides protection as well.

Theriot claimed that patients who wanted birth control or abortion medications not provided by Casey could schedule or be served by other staff at the MinuteClinic, and that worked seamlessly until CVS changed its policy.

"CVS created a problem where none existed," he said.