Abortion will stay legal in Wyoming after the state’s supreme court struck down two near-total abortion bans on Tuesday, ruling that the laws violate the constitution of the profoundly conservative state.
In a 4-1 decision, the justices decided that the two bans – which include the nation’s first exclusive ban on abortion pills – violated a 2012 state constitutional amendment. That amendment affirmed competent adults’ right to make their own healthcare decisions and was originally passed as part of Wyoming’s response to the Affordable Care Act.
“Today, the Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed what we’ve always known to be true: abortion is essential health care, and the government should not interfere in personal decisions about our health,” Julie Burkhart, president of the Wyoming abortion clinic Wellspring Health Access, said in a statement.
“This ruling is a victory for the fundamental right of people across Wyoming to make decisions about their own lives and health.”
One of the laws overturned Tuesday sought to ban abortion except to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills. (Notably, other states have instituted de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly prohibiting abortion). In the four years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion restrictions, abortion pills have grown increasingly popular, especially as abortion providers have begun to mail them into states that ban the procedure.
Wellspring Health Access, the state’s lone abortion clinic, sued in the wake of the bans – alongside the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians. Attorneys for Wyoming argued that the bans could not violate the Wyoming constitution because the state does not view abortion as healthcare.
“If as the state contends, the people did not intend to include abortion care among the health care decisions this constitutional amendment protects, the solution is not for this Court to add language to the constitution. It is beyond our power to do that,” the justices wrote in a footnote in their majority opinion.
“The Legislature, however, could put the question to the people of Wyoming in the form of a constitutional amendment that clearly states what it seeks to accomplish.”
Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s Republican governor, called the ruling “profoundly unfortunate” in a statement. Gordon urged state legislators, who will convene in February, to propose a constitutional amendment that Wyoming voters could approve in the upcoming November elections.
“A constitutional amendment taken to the people of Wyoming would trump any and all judicial decisions,” Gordon said. “Every year that we delay the proper resolution of this issue results in more deaths of unborn children. This is a dilemma of enormous moral and social consequence.”
Such an amendment would require a two-thirds vote to be introduced for consideration during the monthlong legislative session devoted primarily to the state budget. But it would almost certainly have wide support in the Republican-dominated statehouse.
Wyoming is far from the only state now considering amending its state constitution in 2026 to include or exclude abortion rights. Advocates are now working to get abortion-related measures on the ballot in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon and Virginia. Nevada and Missouri are already set to send such measures to voters.
Abortion has remained legal in Wyoming since the Teton county district judge, Melissa Owens, in Jackson blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging them went ahead. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in 2024.
Last year, Wyoming passed additional laws requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers and women to get ultrasounds before having medication abortions. The supreme court ruling means those limitations could take effect, although a judge in a separate lawsuit has blocked them from taking effect while the case proceeds.
Anti-abortion advocates also suffered a setback in Washington DC on Tuesday, as Donald Trump told Republicans that they had to be “flexible” on the Hyde amendment, a decades-old policy that blocks federal dollars from being used to pay for abortions.
“You have to be a little flexible on Hyde,” Trump told a gathered group of Republicans as he talked about GOP strategizing around healthcare and the Affordable Care Act. Last year, Republicans allowed subsidies that kept Affordable Care Act premiums low to expire, sending the cost of premiums soaring for millions of Americans.
“You gotta be a little flexible,” Trump continued. “You gotta work something. You gotta use ingenuity.”
The warning enraged abortion opponents, who have long grown frustrated with Trump’s tendency to flip-flop on abortion. Although Trump’s three supreme court nominees all voted to overturn Roe, Trump tried to downplay and avoid the issue as much as possible during his 2024 campaign.
“For decades, opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion and support for the Hyde Amendment has been an unshakeable bedrock principle and a minimum standard in the Republican Party,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement following Trump’s comments.
“To suggest Republicans should be ‘flexible’ is an abandonment of this decades-long commitment.”
