March 24, 2023

Wyoming district court Judge Melissa Owens’s Wednesday decision temporarily halted her state’s abortion ban, citing a state constitutional amendment that the state legislature passed to spite Obamacare. Here's the background, via Vox:

Last summer, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, an array of patients, doctors, and nonprofit groups brought a suit arguing that Wyoming’s abortion ban violated the state’s constitutional provision protecting each adult’s right to individual health care decisions. That case is known as Johnson v. Wyoming.

Judge Owens handed down a decision in August halting the law. Among other things, she rejected the state’s argument that the health care amendment was “only adopted to push back against the Affordable Care Act,” and should not be construed to protect abortion rights.

Regardless of the political circumstances that led to this amendment being written into the state constitution, Owens reasoned that the amendment “unambiguously provides competent Wyoming citizens with the right to make their own health care decisions,” and she was bound by that unambiguous text. “A court,” she wrote, “is not at liberty to assume that the Wyoming voters who adopted” the amendment “did not understand the force of language in the provision.”

Wyoming’s amendment text states that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.” Now Wyoming politicians are arguing that abortion is not health care. Yeah, tell that to a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, morons.

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