The Wyoming Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether abortion is a 'right’ in the state constitution, a decision that could end years of legal limbo for the state’s pro-life laws.
CHEYENNE, Wyoming (LifeSiteNews) -- The Wyoming Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday over whether abortion is a “right” under the state constitution in a case that will decide the fate of pro-life laws that have been in legal limbo for years despite the fall of Roe v. Wade.
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, 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.
Last year, Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens struck down both laws, ruling 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.
At issue in the case is 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 Wednesday 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.
Pressed by the justices on who gets to determine when life begins or is “viable,” the state argued that the legislature does, because it is the political body most answerable to the people.
The attorneys for the plaintiffs, including sole Wyoming abortion clinic Wellspring Health Access, argued that the pro-life laws “cannot survive any level of scrutiny” because they “do the exact opposite” of protecting women, fetuses, and doctors. They invoked the old pro-abortion talking point that “abortion is safer than childbirth,” and most alarmingly that it “harms fetuses” to prohibit “fetal reduction,” a euphemism for killing one baby supposedly to benefit another.
The pro-abortion side also attempted to argue that the pro-life laws were fundamentally illegitimate by enshrining personhood from conception in the law, which is supposedly illegitimate because such a belief is religious in nature. A number of justices expressed skepticism at that argument, arguing instead that the value society attaches to human life is a philosophical value question, not exclusively theological.
“At the end of the day, this case is about whether an unborn baby has a right to life from conception, and whether there is a right to abortion,” the state argued.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents 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.
