The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s two near-total abortion bans were unconstitutional.
One law banned all abortions except extreme circumstances such as protecting a pregnant woman’s life and cases involving rape or incest. The other law banned the sale, prescription and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs — the first of its kind in the US. Both passed in 2023, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling.
The Wyoming Supreme Court found Tuesday that both these laws violated a 2012 state constitutional amendment. Pushed by Wyoming Republicans in the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and added into the state constitution by voter referendum, the amendment states that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
“That’s what this is about, my fellow senators, I think it’s about choice, about whether you’re free to choose it, about whether you’re free not to choose it,” state Sen. Drew Perkins said in 2011, referring to private healthcare plans as lawmakers feared the ACA would force citizens into public options.
In their opinion, the Wyoming Supreme Court admitted that the lawmakers intent was not to protect abortion but felt that the language was too clear-cut to ignore.
“The Court recognized it cannot add words to the Wyoming Constitution, that’s not its job,” they wrote. “A woman has a fundamental right to make her own health care decisions, including the decision to have an abortion. The State did not meet its burden of demonstrating the Abortion Laws further the compelling interest of protecting unborn life without unduly infringing upon the woman’s fundamental right to make her own health care decisions.”
Giovanna Anthony, an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Jackson, Wyoming, was a plaintiff in the case. She celebrated the win.
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“This is very much something that affects everybody in every small town and every setting in the state,” she told Wyoming Public Media Tuesday.
State Republicans weren’t happy with the outcome. Gov. Mark Gordon, who signed both abortion bans into law, called the ruling “profoundly unfortunate.”
“[The ruling] may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one,” he said in a statement.
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