Wyoming’s lone full-service abortion clinic called on a judge to block the state’s latest abortion laws, claiming they violate a constitutional right to make one’s own health care choices and seek to use onerous regulations to block access to in-clinic abortions.
The lawsuit was filed after midnight Friday, hours after Gov. Mark Gordon signed legislation placing new restrictions on clinics that perform abortions.
Casper’s Wellspring Health Access is the one facility in Wyoming that provides in-clinic abortions. The clinic has joined other plaintiffs in previous lawsuits against attempts by Wyoming lawmakers to ban abortions. One of those lawsuits now sits in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court.
But lawmakers have continued heaping new restrictions onto abortion providers in the state and this year pushed a bill targeting Wellspring. House Bill 42, “Regulation of surgical abortions,” would require Wellspring to be licensed as an ambulatory surgical center — health care facilities that perform surgeries but are not hospitals. The classification comes with Department of Health inspections, rules and regulations, such as building codes.
According to the lawsuit, the bill piled seven onerous requirements on Wellspring in an attempt to force its closure. The measure was written to be effective as law immediately following Gordon’s signature.
The lawsuit also cites House Bill 64, “Chemical abortions-ultrasound requirement”, which requires a woman to get an intrusive ultrasound within 48 hours of an abortion.
Legislative intentions
Though conservative lawmakers pitched the bills as an effort to keep patients safe, Wyoming Speaker of the House Chip Nieman has said that he hopes the ultrasound bill, at least, gets women to rethink their abortions, not just regulate them. “I absolutely believe life is precious,” he said during debate on that bill. “That we should do everything that we possibly can to protect it. ”
Nieman sponsored the ultrasound bill.
On Friday, however, Nieman told WyoFile neither bill is designed to ban abortions. “There’s no limit on the abortion. It’s simply the mechanics of it, and making sure we do our due diligence to provide safety and clarity on the procedures,” Nieman said. It would be great to stop abortions, he said, “but I just can’t.”
His concern is for the health and well-being of women, he said. “Make sure the mother isn’t going to have her life compromised,” Nieman said.
Rep. Martha Lawley, who sponsored the bill regulating in-clinic abortions, also disputed the lawsuit’s suggestion that she was trying to ban abortions in a roundabout way. “My intent is to regulate and make [abortions] safer,” Lawley said. Because abortions were so long a protected right under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, states had underregulated the industry, Lawley said.
“As long as abortion remains legal, it is important to me that we know that people are safe, women, as they choose [abortions], are safe,” the Worland Republican said.
The filing disagrees with the lawmakers’ contentions.
“Under the Criminal TRAP Laws, abortion care-providing physicians will be required to meet onerous and costly requirements not required of any other physicians practicing medicine in their private offices who conduct minor procedures or prescribe and dispense medications,” the lawsuit read.
The complaint, authored by Jackson attorney John Robinson, asks a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and injunctions blocking the two laws’ implementation. Plaintiffs asked a judge to hold an emergency hearing on Friday or as soon as possible.
Clinic open — for now
The clinic remained open Friday, Wellspring founder and president Julie Burkhart told WyoFile. “But we are not seeing patients at the moment,” Burkhart said. “While we have this new regulation to navigate, we are not abandoning our patients — we are still there for them.”
A small group of anti-abortion protesters were outside the clinic Friday morning. They were stationed in the parking lot behind the facility in front of a car with a “Choose Life” sign displayed from the windshield.
Lawley, an attorney, said she welcomed judicial review of her bill. She believes it will withstand challenges on its merits, she said. Once the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, she believes the legal underpinnings for TRAP lawsuits were wiped out.
In a declaration filed with the lawsuit Friday, Burkhart wrote that the Legislature was attempting to foster “moral public outrage and dissent against all forms of abortion care.” Wellspring has already faced an arson’s attack, she noted, when a 22-year-old Laramie woman set fire to the clinic, causing $300,000 in damages and delaying its opening by ten months.
The latest laws create “safety risks for abortion clinics like Wellspring, in a state where abortion clinics are already at risk of serious harm,” Burkhart said. She argued HB 42 deliberately created an existential choice for the health care workers that have dedicated their time and energy to developing the clinic.
“Wellspring will face an impossible choice,” she wrote, “to no longer provide the primary services that we are set up — and hold ourselves out as available — to provide to patients, thus losing goodwill and revenue to cover operating costs, or to provide those services and expose our staff to criminal prosecution and loss of licensure.”
She also said because Wellspring serves the entirety of rural and sparsely populated Wyoming, the ultrasound requirement burdens the clinic’s patients with extra trips to Casper and a new set of hurdles. Ultrasounds before an abortion are “an invasive, uncomfortable procedure not considered necessary by the medical community,” Burkhart wrote.
Wellspring’s patients would have to travel to Casper for that procedure, and wait there or return home for two days before returning to the clinic for their abortion procedure.
If my taxpayers money isn’t part of funding any of this then consider the prison population of death row and get it moving.
As always, vote for idiots, expect idiocy. Women have a right to make their OWN choices regarding abortions. It’s THEIR choice, not that of some bible-thumping idiot who believes in some imaginary being from outer space.
Nor the business of the little humjan growing insider of them, I guess? Why would that human have a say?
That “little human inside of them” argument is as old, and ignorant, as it always was. Funny, but I have no memories of anything farther back than age 2, post-birth.
You can look at it any way you want. If it’s not your embryo or your body, it’s none of your business.
The religious fanatics in our legislature know exactly what they trying to do: limit our health care choices, which is unconstitutional. Already some women in Wyoming have to drive hundreds of miles to see a GYN, and this is going to get worse. They’re going to drive women and families out of the state and cause deaths due to untreated pregnancy complications. They should be ashamed.
Exactly how many deaths are you talking about and why should they be untreated? Pregnancy or not most folks see a doctor if they get sick, especially THAT sick. Paternity can and should be determined and the father required to support the baby. As for doctor shortage, unfortunately this is a small population state spread over a vast physical space, creating some difficulty earning a living, especially if there is no way to insure payment for their work.
Soros/Gates behind this