Judge blocks Wyoming's first-in-the-nation abortion pill ban

A closeup of a person's left hand poised to pick up a round white pill from the palm of their open right hand.

By MEAD GRUVER

Associated Press

June 22, 2023 4:43 PM PT

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Abortion pills will remain legal in Wyoming for now, after a judge ruled Thursday that the state’s first-in-the-nation law to ban them won’t take effect July 1 as planned while a lawsuit proceeds.

Attorneys for Wyoming failed to show that allowing the ban to take effect on schedule wouldn’t harm the lawsuit’s plaintiffs before their case is resolved, Teton County Judge Melissa Owens ruled after hearing arguments from both sides.

Meanwhile, those plaintiffs “have clearly showed probable success on the merits,” Owens said in granting their request to temporarily block the pill ban.

While other states have instituted de facto bans on the medication by broadly prohibiting abortion, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon signed a law in March that made Wyoming the first U.S. state to specifically ban abortion pills.

Two nonprofit organizations, including an abortion clinic that opened in Casper, Wyo., in April; sued along with four women, two of them obstetricians, to challenge the law. They asked Owens to suspend the ban while their lawsuit plays out.

The plaintiffs are also suing to stop a near-total ban on abortion enacted in Wyoming in March. Owens has suspended that law, too, and has combined the two lawsuits.

Because abortion remains legal in Wyoming, banning abortion pills would require women to get more invasive surgical abortions instead, Marci Bramlet, an attorney for the ban opponents, told Owens in Thursday’s hearing.

“It effectively tells people you must have open-heart surgery when a stent would do,” Bramlet said.

A state constitutional amendment enacted in 2012 also came into play in court arguments. The amendment — which was passed in response to the federal Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare — says Wyoming residents have the right to make their own healthcare decisions.

Wyoming’s new abortion laws allow exceptions to save life and for cases of rape or incest that are reported to police. But Jay Jerde, an attorney for the state, argued that abortion for other reasons isn’t considered healthcare under the amendment.

“It’s not restoring a woman’s body from pain, injury or physical sickness,” Jerde said. “Medical services are involved, but getting an abortion for reasons other than healthcare — it can’t be a medical decision.”

Pregnancy involves pain and sickness, Owens pointed out. But women don’t get abortions for that reason, countered Jerde.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs later questioned how the state could know the motives of those who seek abortions.

Wyoming’s new laws were enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade last year. Since then, some 25 million women and teenagers have been subjected to either stricter controls on ending their pregnancies or almost total bans on the procedure.

While other states have instituted de facto bans on the medication by broadly prohibiting abortion, Wyoming is the first and only state to attempt to specifically ban the pills. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that access to one of the two pills, mifepristone, may continue while litigants seek to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of it.

The plaintiffs in the Wyoming abortion lawsuits include Wellspring Health Access, which after a 2022 arson attack opened in April as Wyoming’s first full-service abortion clinic in years. Wellspring’s services include abortions using pills.

“Medication abortion is safe, effective, and has been approved by the FDA for more than two decades. Abortion pills account for more than half of all abortions in the United States and we are proud to provide medication abortion to patients from across the Mountain West at our Casper facility,” Wellspring President Julie Burkhart said in a statement praising the ruling.

Previously only one other clinic in Wyoming — a women’s health center in Jackson, some 250 miles away — offered pill abortions.

Wyoming officials didn’t immediately return a request for comment, but had previously promised to vigorously defend the legality of the new laws.

In recent years, abortions using two kinds of pills, usually taken days apart, have become the preferred method in the United States for ending pregnancies, in part because the process is less invasive than surgical abortions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, 13 states have enacted blanket abortion bans that include medication abortions, and 15 states already had limited access to the pills.

Judge Owens has now blocked three abortion bans signed into law by Gordon, the Republican governor who appointed her, starting with an abortion ban that was set to take effect last summer.

She serves GOP-dominated Sublette and Fremont counties as well as Teton County, an ultrawealthy and less conservative area.