Wyoming legislators who passed the state’s latest anti-abortion bill and made it law by overriding Gov. Mark Gordon’s veto hid behind false claims that they are making women safer and treating them with compassion.
Opinion
If they really want to accomplish that, lawmakers will stop interfering with a woman’s state constitutional right to make her own health care decision to have a safe, legal abortion, and quit trying to shame and punish them.
There is absolutely nothing safe or compassionate about mandating a transvaginal ultrasound before a woman can be prescribed abortion pills. In his veto message Gordon recognized that this “intimate, personally invasive, and often medically unnecessary procedure goes too far.”
Transvaginal ultrasounds are performed by inserting a wand-like device into a woman’s vagina to check for a fetal heartbeat. House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, told the House Labor, Health and Social Services Committee that it’s compassionate for the state to let mothers “hear that heartbeat and be able to know that that baby is real.”
But medication abortions are FDA-approved to be performed up to the 10th week of pregnancy, a time when the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says what is interpreted as a heartbeat in many state laws “is actually electrically-induced flickering of a portion of fetal tissue that will become the heart as the embryo develops.”
So, the sounds Neiman and other anti-abortion legislators want Wyoming women seeking an abortion to hear — and obviously change their minds — is what the medical group describes as “out of step with the anatomical and clinical realities of that stage of pregnancy.”
Let’s talk about something that is real that Neiman didn’t mention, but Gordon said in his veto message: The legislation could retraumatize women who are victims of childhood sexual abuse, rape or incest but not exempted by the bill.
That’s the reasonable position of a governor who always stresses he’s “pro-life.” Still, Gordon signed an earlier bill aimed at regulating the state’s only surgical abortion clinic out of existence. No matter where some Republican officials land on the abortion issue, there always seems to be room for laws that make a legal procedure inaccessible.
The two bills are a combination punch against abortion that lawmakers will keep throwing year after year. They insist — by any means necessary — on effectively making abortion unattainable while the Wyoming Supreme Court decides to affirm or reject a lower court ruling that the state’s two existing abortion bans are unconstitutional.
Far-right lawmakers didn’t need to pass House Bill 64, “Chemical abortion-ultrasound requirement,” especially if they really believe Wyoming’s highest court will buy the state’s absurd argument that abortion isn’t health care. It’s nothing but a stop-gap measure to erect another barrier if they lose.
Last November, 9th Judicial District Court Judge Melissa Owens in Teton County ruled the state’s bans on surgical and medication abortions violate the constitutional protections voters overwhelmingly approved in 2012 to ensure that competent adults can make their own health care decisions.
Owens wrote that Wyoming’s abortion bans “suspend a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions during the entire term of her pregnancy and are not reasonable or necessary to protect the health and general welfare of the people.”
Several of the plaintiffs who won that case — including Wellspring Health Access, two OB-GYN physicians, a birthing-age woman and a nonprofit group that raises money for women to get abortions — have already sued the state over HB 64 and House Bill 42, “Regulation of surgical abortions.”
The latter targeted Casper’s Wellspring clinic — the victim of arson in 2022 that caused $300,000 in damages — by piling unnecessary restrictions on the only facility in the state to offer surgical abortions, more accurately called “procedural” abortions, since they do not require incisions.
Wellspring stopped the procedures after Gordon signed the bill into law, though it remains open to provide other women’s health care services.
The lawsuit seeks a temporary injunction on the enforcement of both laws while the 7th Judicial District Court in Natrona County decides if they violate pregnant women’s constitutional rights.
Don’t far-right legislators who continue passing these laws realize that they will always be challenged, delaying them further and creating chaos in the state?
The ultrasound mandate also requires a woman to wait at least 48 hours after the procedure to get a prescription for mifepristone and misoprostol. Both oral medications have a long safety and efficacy record and are used for nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions.
The delay is an expensive burden for rural women who will have to spend two days away from work and pay for child care, transportation and lodging, plus the mandatory ultrasound.
The new law makes it a misdemeanor for a physician or pharmacist to dispense the pills without verifying that an ultrasound has been performed. The penalty is a fine up to $9,000 and/or imprisonment for a maximum of six months.
Jailing and fining medical providers is not what legislators should do in a state that has already closed four maternity wards in recent years. Nearly one-quarter of women live more than 30 miles away from a birthing facility, making much of Wyoming a maternity care desert that forces them to travel long distances, often in inclement weather, to deliver babies. Yet lawmakers offered no solutions, preferring to potentially lock up some of the scarce providers we have.
“Making it easier for mothers to have babies in Wyoming and supporting them afterward is a far better course [than HB 64],” Gordon noted in his veto letter. He’s right about that, and it’s time other Republicans heed that warning.
Minority Floor Leader Mike Yin, D-Laramie, told his fellow House Labor committee members that it’s mind boggling to hear Republicans express the need to enforce bodily autonomy on health care procedures like blood donations. Let’s not forget the Freedom Caucus’ bills against the power of the state to mandate COVID-19 vaccines and masks.
“Yet this [ultrasound bill] is one where we’re telling women that they have to have a medical procedure done against their will, or their medical providers will go to jail,” Yin said. “I think that’s the antithesis when we talk about freedom in the state of Wyoming.”
In late 2021, New Hampshire passed a similar transvaginal ultrasound mandate. Six months later, after women and providers complained about this barrier to health care that served only to shame women and put up roadblocks to abortion access, state lawmakers repealed it.
The same thing could happen in Wyoming next year if legislators are forced to listen to valid concerns or risk losing their jobs at the polls.
Emma Laurent, political director of Wyoming United for Freedom, a nonpartisan pro-choice group, provided one of the most sensible takes on abortion that I heard during the session. This shouldn’t be a political issue.
“Forcing non-medically needed ultrasounds on women seeking medication abortions in the early gestational stage of pregnancy,” Laurent said, “is not only a coercive act to guilt women to keep pregnancies, but discriminates against women by stripping us of our bodily autonomy and the social compact that we as an entire gender can make our own health care decisions.
“Anything less is an admission that you believe women are second-class citizens,” she added.
That’s speaking truth to power. If we want to stop Wyoming women from being hurt and protect their reproductive rights, we must put legislators who hypocritically preach against government overreach but vote for bills like this on notice: We’ll see you at the next election.
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