WASHINGTON — A federal court issued a nationwide injunction Monday that prevents the Trump administration from interfering with women’s access to free birth control guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act.

The decision, by Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, extends a losing streak for President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly been set back in his efforts to allow employers to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to which the employers object on religious or moral grounds.

The rules were scheduled to take effect Monday. The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged the rules before Beetlestone, saying they would have to shoulder much of the burden of providing contraceptives to women who lost coverage under the Trump administration’s rules.

“The states’ harm is not merely speculative; it is actual and imminent,” Beetlestone wrote.

The Trump administration argued the states had not identified anyone who had lost coverage under the rules. Beetlestone replied: “There is no need to wait for the ax to fall before an injunction is appropriate, particularly where defendants have estimated that it is about to fall on thousands of women — and, as a corollary, on the states.”

Her decision was issued less than 24 hours after Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, granted a request by 13 states and the District of Columbia to block the rules in their jurisdictions.

“Women who lose their entitlement to cost-free contraceptives are less likely to use an effective method, or any method at all — resulting in unintended pregnancies,” Gilliam said.

President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010. One section of the law requires coverage of preventive health services and screenings for women. In August 2011, the Obama administration required employers and insurers to provide women with coverage at no cost for all methods of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

For its part, the Trump administration said the contraceptive coverage mandate imposed a “substantial burden” on the exercise of religion by certain employers. The new rules, relaxing the mandate, fulfilled a campaign pledge by Trump, who said employers should not be “bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.