Wyoming abortion ban blocked on account of Obamacare-era amendment

Abortion is legal in Wyoming again, oddly enough as the results of a state constitutional amendment pushed by conservatives against Obamacare greater than a decade ago.

Teton County District Court Judge Melissa Owens in a ruling Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of the state’s newly enacted abortion ban that took effect Sunday.

Owens’ decision pointed to a 2012 amendment to the state structure that granted Wyoming residents the proper to make their very own health-care decisions. 

Wyoming voters overwhelmingly passed that amendment, which was intended to guard them from hypothetical harms contained in then-President Barack Obama’s signature health law, the Inexpensive Care Act.

Anti-abortion lawmakers in Wyoming have tried to work across the 2012 amendment in passing the ban on abortion.

The state’s sweeping ban, dubbed “Life is a Human Right Act,” claims that abortion will not be a type of health care.

“As an alternative of being health care, abortion is the intentional termination of the lifetime of an unborn baby,” the act says, explicitly targeting the anti-Obamacare amendment within the structure.

The ban prohibits abortion in most circumstances, providing exceptions for incest, sexual assault, cases of “lethal fetal anomaly,” or when the pregnant person’s life is in peril. Violation of the law is a felony and carries penalties of as much as five years in prison and a $20,000 high quality.

But Owens in her ruling Wednesday said the state legislature was overstepping its authority.

“To declare abortion will not be health care when there could also be evidence to indicate that it’s — the legislature cannot make an end run around essentially providing a constitutional amendment,” she said during a hearing on Wednesday, in accordance with a Latest York Times report.

Owens added “the state cannot legislate away a constitutional right. It is not clear if abortion is or is not health care, and the court has to then determine that.”

She also told Jay Jerde, a special assistant attorney general for Wyoming who’s defending the law for the state, “I’m just still hung up on abortion not being health care,” the Times reported.

“An abortion can only be performed by a licensed medical skilled, so what authority does the legislature should declare that abortion will not be health care when our laws only allow a licensed medical skilled to manage one?” she asked Jerde throughout the hearing.

Owen’s decision pauses the abortion ban until further court proceedings in a lawsuit difficult it. It’s unclear whether the court will ultimately agree that the anti-Obamacare amendment prohibits a state abortion ban. 

The constitutional amendment accommodates language that may allow the ban to take effect. That amendment said the state legislature “may determine reasonable and essential restrictions on the rights granted” by the amendment.

Across other states, constitutional amendments have turn into unlikely weapons within the fight against restrictions on abortion. For example, a judge in Ohio in October temporarily blocked the state’s abortion ban due to a constitutional provision adopted in 2011 as a backlash to Obamacare.

In South Carolina, the Supreme Court struck down the state’s abortion ban after six weeks, ruling that it violated the proper to privacy within the state’s structure. Similarly, a Florida judge in June temporarily paused the ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy since it violated the state’s constitutional right to privacy.

Those actions represent a broader shift within the legal battle over abortion rights after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the half century-old Roe v. Wade ruling. After that, abortion rights were largely left as much as individual states. Some states rushed to ban the procedure completely, while others step by step rolled out recent restrictions. Most abortions are actually banned in greater than a dozen states, including Texas, Idaho, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia. 

The Wyoming judge’s decision on Wednesday comes as Republican opposition to Obamacare has died down considerably.

Obamacare aimed to make health care cheaper by offering tax credits for individual private medical health insurance plans and expanding Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that gives health coverage to lower-income Americans.

Obamacare also mandated that medical health insurance plans needed to contain certain minimum coverage advantages.

Republicans strongly opposed the law on the time, arguing that it represented “a government takeover of health care” that deprived Americans of their ability to decide on their very own doctors and make medical decisions.

GOP lawmakers throughout the Trump administration repeatedly did not repeal the ACA, much less approve a alternative law. Within the meantime, 39 states have expanded their Medicaid programs to more beneficiaries under the ACA.

Wyoming is the only real Western state to not have expanded Medicaid.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.