Abortion stays legal in Wyoming as its top court strikes down laws, including first U.S. pill ban

This April 24, 2023. photo, shows the Wellspring Health Access clinic in Casper, Wyo. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that two laws barring the procedure, including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills, violate the state constitution.

The justices sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the abortion bans passed since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

Wyoming is one of the most conservative states, but the 4-1 ruling from justices all appointed by Republican governors was unsurprising in that it upheld every previous lower court ruling that the abortion bans violated the state constitution.

Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment ensuring competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.

Voters approved the constitutional amendment in 2012 in response to the federal Affordable Care Act. The justices recognized that the amendment wasn’t written to apply to abortion but said it’s not their job to “add words” to the state constitution.

“But lawmakers could ask Wyoming voters to consider a constitutional amendment that would more clearly address this issue,” the justices wrote.

The ruling upholds abortion as “essential health care” that shouldn’t be subject to government interference, Wellspring Health Access President Julie Burkhart said in a statement.

“Our clinic will remain open and ready to provide compassionate reproductive health care, including abortions, and our patients in Wyoming will be able to obtain this care without having to travel out of state,” Burkhart said.

The clinic opened in 2023 as the only facility of its kind in the state, almost a year later than planned after an arson attack. A woman who admitted breaking in and causing heavy damage by lighting gasoline that she poured over the clinic floors pleaded guilty and has been serving a five-year prison sentence.

Attorneys for the state had argued before the state Supreme Court that abortion can’t violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not health care.

Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement that the court ruling disappointed him. He called on state lawmakers meeting later this winter to pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion that would go before voters this fall.

“This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself. It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote,” Gordon said.

Such an amendment would require a two-thirds vote to be introduced as a nonbudget matter in the monthlong legislative session that will be devoted primarily to the state budget. But it would have wide support in the Republican-dominated statehouse.

One of the laws overturned Tuesday sought to ban abortion except to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, though other states have instituted de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly prohibiting abortion.

Abortion has remained legal in the state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens in Jackson blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging them went ahead. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in 2024.

Last year, Wyoming passed additional laws requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers and women to get ultrasounds before having medication abortions. A judge in a separate lawsuit has blocked those laws from taking effect while that case proceeds.

Thirteen states currently ban abortion completely after the North Dakota Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling and upheld that state’s abortion ban in November.

Mead Gruver, The Associated Press