Wyoming high court rejects state abortion ban with thoughtful opinion

Wyoming’s amendment begins by granting every adult this sweeping right to make their own health care decisions, and it shields that right from “undue government infringement.” Everybody ignored that this was part of the state constitution until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Then the Wyoming Legislature passed a ban on virtually all abortions at every stage of pregnancy. A group of doctors sued and said: These abortion bans violate the right to medical decisionmaking secured in our state constitution. And on Tuesday, the Wyoming Supreme Court said they were correct....

the key move here is the court’s holding that terminating a pregnancy is a health care decision. The state of Wyoming argued that it wasn’t. It said: Abortion isn’t health care, so it doesn’t fall under this provision whatsoever. And the majority said that that was wrong; given the often detrimental impact of pregnancy on an individual’s health, the choice to terminate is clearly a health care decision. That means all restrictions on it must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest....

The court held that Wyoming’s ban was not narrowly tailored to protect “fetal life.” And it did so by pointing to its lack of meaningful, coherent exceptions. So, for instance, state law allows termination for lethal fetal defects only if the baby would die within hours or days of birth. But the plaintiffs had doctors testify that they could not know for certain whether an infant with these defects would live for days, weeks, or maybe even a few months before suffering a painful death. So the majority said: Look, it’s illogical for the state to make patients carry a doomed high-risk pregnancy just because that infant might live a few more days or a few more weeks before inevitably dying. In legal terms, the law was tailored in a very arbitrary way, seemingly to prolong the suffering of women, as well as fetuses who were not going to survive if they were born.