(LifeSiteNews) — The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled 4-1 on Tuesday that a pair of state pro-life laws were unconstitutional, effectively reading a “right” to abortion in the state constitution.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2023, Wyoming enacted the “Life Is a Human Right Act,” which forbids abortion by any surgical or chemical method except in cases of rape, incest, so-called “lethal fetal abnormality,” or “medical emergencies,” and forbids the use of public funds to pay for abortions.
The law was meant to replace the state’s pre-Roe trigger ban, which had been held up in court. That year, Wyoming also became the first state with a law specifically dedicated to banning so-called “medication” abortions, a popular method to get around surgical abortion bans.
In 2024, Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens struck down both laws, claiming that they “impede the fundamental right to make health care decisions for an entire class of people, pregnant women.” Pro-lifers condemned the ruling as a display of judicial activism and vowed to appeal.
Last year, the state’s highest court heard arguments in the matter, which concerned whether abortion restrictions violate language in Section 38 of the Wyoming Constitution guaranteeing the right of “competent adults” to “make his or her own health care decisions,” including the right to pay or accept “direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.” The constitution gives the state legislature the discretion to “determine reasonable and necessary restrictions” to “protect the health and general welfare of the people.”
The state argued both that abortion is not health care and made the point that even if it is deemed otherwise, the fact would remain that abortion is not strictly a woman’s “own” health care decision because it also affects the health of her child, who is a living human from conception, and therefore Section 38 cannot cover it.
The pro-abortion side argued that abortion restrictions did not protect women and that enshrining personhood from conception in the law was illegitimate because such a belief was supposedly religious in nature.
In its ruling, the justices concluded that the “record shows that abortions are medical procedures performed or administered by qualified medical professionals,” that “pregnancy can cause and exacerbate certain physical and mental health conditions,” and therefore abortion qualifies as health care under the constitutional language, despite the fact that its purpose is the destruction of an innocent unborn child.
“The State asserts it has a compelling interest in preserving prenatal life at all stages of development, and it contends that ‘only the State through its lawmaking authority can prevent the indiscriminate killing of many unborn babies caused by elective abortion,’” the court adds. “The State offers very little evidence or authority in support of this broad conclusory statement. That said, we need not decide in this case whether the State has a compelling interest in protecting unborn life from the moment of conception because even if we assume the State has such an interest, it has not met its burden of showing the Abortion Laws are narrowly tailored to serve that compelling interest.”
Julie Burkhart, president of the state’s only abortion center, Wellspring Health Access, celebrated the news, saying the facility remains “ready to provide” abortions.
“This ruling is profoundly unfortunate and sadly only serves to prolong the ultimate and proper resolution of this issue. This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself,” responded Republican Gov. Mark Gordon. “It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote, and I believe it should go before them this fall. A constitutional amendment taken to the people of Wyoming would trump any and all judicial decisions. I call on the legislature to pass and place a clear constitutional amendment on my desk during the upcoming Budget Session.”
“I remain committed to the mission of saving our unborn,” he added. “Every year that we delay the proper resolution of this issue results in more deaths of unborn children. This is a dilemma of enormous moral and social consequence.”
The fall of Roe restored states’ prerogative to fully determine their own abortion policies for the first time in nearly half a century, but Wyoming’s latest setback highlights the continuing battles faced by pro-lifers at the state level.
Twelve states ban all or most abortions, with a wide range of lesser restrictions also in effect. But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.