The same Teton County judge who tossed Wyoming’s two abortion bans last year dismissed on Friday a separate lawsuit filed in Jackson that sought to block two new Wyoming abortion laws, saying the case belonged in Natrona County, home to the affected Wellspring Health Access clinic.
Ruling from the bench after a hearing that lasted more than 90 minutes, Ninth District Judge Melissa Owens said that “any injury that occurred, occurred in Natrona County.” The ruling means that Wyoming women who have not had access to abortion services since the de facto ban went into effect Feb. 28 will have to wait until the case is presumably refiled and then considered by a different judge.
In the five days after one law went into effect, Wellspring referred 56 patients to other clinics for abortion-related services, almost all of them out of state, according to court papers.
Two doctors, two abortion care providers and an individual woman filed a nearly identical suit in Natrona County when one of the new laws went into effect, challenging its constitutionality. That law imposes a series of new regulations on abortion clinics by mandating they be licensed as “ambulatory surgical centers.” A second, which went into effect days later, requires abortion patients to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound and a 48-hour waiting period before receiving abortion medications.
The plaintiffs sought emergency court action on requests for a temporary restraining order and an injunction. But when a Natrona County judge did not respond to their emergency request in what they perceived as a timely manner, they dismissed their case there and filed the carbon-copy action in Teton County.
“We could not get any type of response” 12 days after filing the action, five business days after the last communication from the court, said Marci Bramlet, an attorney representing the plaintiff doctors. One of her clients, Dr. Giovannina Anthony, has an OBGYN clinic in Jackson and refers clients to Wellspring, the only clinic in the state that provides procedural abortions.
Wellspring has ceased offering those services because of the new laws and has turned away at least three clients from Teton County, Bramlet said. She rejected an argument by state Senior Attorney General John Woykovsky that the group was “forum shopping.”
In November, Owens decided two other anti-abortion law challenges — those involved outright bans — in favor of nearly the same suite of plaintiffs.
The Teton County filing was “not because of what we were hearing,” Bramlet said, but “because we were hearing nothing.” Her clients did not believe their case was being taken seriously and, meantime, “injury is ongoing and could be catastrophic.”
Woykovsky said Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey couldn’t act until he received proof that required court papers had been served on defendants there. Owens appeared to agree there was no foot-dragging on Forgey’s part, that the doctors had waited only a few days before dismissing one suit and filing the other.
Regardless of Judge Forgey’s timing, Bramlet said her clients had a right to dismiss their action as they saw fit and refile it anywhere in Wyoming, given that the new laws cover the entire state. Although Woykovsky’s court pleading was for a change of venue back to Natrona County, Owens saw it as a request for dismissal and acted thusly.
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