The Wyoming Supreme Court knocked down two abortion restrictions Tuesday — one of which is the nation’s first targeted ban of abortion pills — finding that they violate the state constitution.
Specifically, the 4-1 majority found that the laws violated the constitution’s “right of health care access” provision: “Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
Voters passed that amendment in 2012 to gird against real or imagined facets of the Affordable Care Act: the concern that patients wouldn’t be able to choose their own doctors, that “death panels” would deny coverage to older and disabled patients and that Wyoming would become part of a single-payer system. The Wyoming attorney general called it a “message” amendment to express “the state’s displeasure with the controversial federal Affordable Care Act.”
On Tuesday, that anti-Obamacare amendment saved abortion care in the state.
Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden wrote for the majority that the amendment requires the anti-abortion laws to survive strict scrutiny — they must be as narrowly tailored as possible to serve a legitimate state interest. The state hardly tried to show that the bans were narrowly tailored, she wrote, instead arguing that abortion isn’t health care, that getting an abortion isn’t a woman’s own medical decision and that the laws shouldn’t be subject to strict scrutiny. The majority disagreed on all counts.
Boomgaarden was particularly dismissive of Wyoming’s argument that the laws would actually protect women, a common anti-abortion refrain.
“The state claimed the provisions served the compelling state interest of protecting women’s health, but it did not present evidence showing the restrictions actually protected women’s health when an abortion was necessary to save a woman’s life,” she wrote. “Instead, the laws unnecessarily burdened women’s rights to obtain timely life-saving abortions.”
That’s particularly true in the case of pregnant women with mental illnesses, which the bans would not have exempted. She wrote that the laws “could place a woman with a diagnosed mental health condition in mortal peril by not allowing her to exercise her fundamental right to make her own health care decision to have an abortion.”
Justice John Fenn wrote a concurrence, siding with the majority’s findings but breaking with its decision to review the laws under strict scrutiny. Justice Kari Jo Gray dissented.
Tuesday’s is the latest episode in a common storyline since Dobbs: red state constitutions thwarting abortion restrictions passed by their largely Republican legislatures. The Kansas Supreme Court has knocked down abortion restrictions repeatedly, finding them in violation of the constitution’s guarantee of personal autonomy.
Some states, including Montana and Missouri, shored up that constitutional safeguard after Dobbs, passing amendments that explicitly guarantee the right to abortion.
Wyoming’s constitutional amendment, while passed as a rebuke to a Democratic president’s signature legislation, has inadvertently become a similarly effective shield against abortion restrictions in the state.
Read the ruling here:
They just can’t help keep from shooting themselves in the dick.
They still need to do that more and hurry up about it.
This is both wonderful and hilarious.
They really should have higher aims.
MAGA Response: :”DOH!”