Background: The Wyoming Supreme Court building (Wyoming Judicial Branch). Inset: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon speaks at the 2024 summer meeting of the National Governors Association, July 11, 2024, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File).
Wyoming”s governor and attorney general are pleading with the state’s supreme court to reconsider its ruling that abortion is protected in the state constitution, arguing the high court changed its own rules without informing them.
Gov. Mark Gordon announced on Jan. 6 that he was asking Wyoming Attorney General Keith Kautz to file a petition for rehearing with the state supreme court within 15 days over its abortion ruling, and sure enough, that petition was delivered on Tuesday. The governor expressed his “deep disappointment” in the ruling, which traced the state’s history on the topic back to 2012.
As the state’s high court recounts in its 70-page ruling, that year “voters passed an amendment to the Wyoming Constitution that gave Wyoming adults the right to make their own health care decisions.” It was designed to counteract the Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare — stating the “legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people” and that the state “shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.”
In 2023, following the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade the previous year, the Wyoming legislature passed a law called the Life is a Human Right Act, prohibiting abortions with limited exceptions, as well as a law forbidding the use of abortion-related drugs. A group of medical professionals, two nonprofit corporations, and an individual woman sued, arguing the laws violate the state’s constitution.
A trial court sided with the plaintiffs, and the state appealed that decision, landing the case in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court.
While considering the case, the state’s high court said it focused on a single issue: “Do the Wyoming laws restricting abortions unjustifiably limit a woman’s state constitutional right to make her own health care decisions?” They determined that they indeed do, stating “all five Wyoming Supreme Court justices agreed that the decision whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy is a woman’s own health care decision.”
Gordon, however, argued that the “profoundly unfortunate” ruling “only serves to prolong the ultimate and proper resolution of this issue.”
“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,” he wrote, also on Jan. 6. Gordon then indicated his intention for citizens to vote on a constitutional amendment concerning abortion this fall that “would trump any and all judicial decisions.”
Before then, though, if Gordon and Kautz — himself a former state supreme court justice — get their way, the Wyoming justices will reconsider their ruling, which the attorney general’s office suggested contained “a number of legal errors.”
As Cowboy State Daily reported, the state’s chief attorney contends that the justices ignored precedent and approached the case in a manner more favorable to the plaintiffs. As Wyoming Special Assistant Attorney General Jay Jerde, who wrote the filing, puts it, the high court moved away from the established standard — under which the plaintiffs would need to show that there is “no set of circumstances” in which the abortion laws could be constitutional — and instead determined that the plaintiffs only needed to show that the laws are unconstitutional as to the state’s interaction with them.
The attorney general’s office maintains that the high court “changed the legal rules governing this case after the parties had presented briefing and argument under a different set of rules.” In doing so, the justices “deprived this Court of vigorous adversarial argument on the issue.”
Jerde also argues that the Wyoming Supreme Court contradicted itself, suggesting one justice just “apparently changed her mind” from a previous case.
As the state news source notes, the Wyoming Supreme Court does not need to grant the request for a rehearing.
As it stands, abortion is legal throughout pregnancy in Wyoming.
