The Bush administration has been trying for months to enact a rule that could severely limit access to birth control, emergency contraception and other reproductive health services. Now, despite fierce protests from doctors, pharmacy groups, women’s rights groups and congressional leaders, the Department of Health and Human Services has exhumed the rule—which some thought dead after months of outcry—and is trying to implement its sweeping restrictions.

The administration has said the rule is necessary to protect workers, but on Tuesday the New York Times reported that three officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, one of them a Bush appointee, publicly criticized the move, saying it would overturn decades of established civil rights law.

President-elect Barack Obama, who has made it clear he opposes the rule, said that if it were implemented before he takes office, as president he would try to overturn it. But that would throw many states and health care providers into a months-long mess of confusion.

As the Independent has previously noted, a draft of the regulations was leaked earlier this year by the Times. The new rule would require all health care providers who get federal money to certify that they would not discriminate against employees who have moral objections to certain procedures and services, including abortion and end-of-life directives. The proposed regulations redefine abortion so broadly that it could include birth control methods including the pill, the most widely used form of birth control in the country.

And as Jane Wishner, executive director of the Southwest Women’s Law Center in Albuquerque, told the Independent in August, the proposed rule would be in direct conflict with several New Mexico laws, including one that requires rape victims to be given information about, and access to, emergency contraception while in the emergency room.

The administration is expecting to finalize the rule this week.