The Wyoming Supreme Court has struck down the State’s ban on abortion pills. Whether or not abortion pills are reasonable or safe or ought to be banned or not, the Court’s “reasoning” is deficient.

The court found that the state “failed to prove the 2023 laws were ‘reasonable and necessary restrictions’ on the right to make one’s own health care decisions.”

In so ruling, the court in the main relied on the Wyoming Constitution‘s Article 1, Section 38, which says,

a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.
(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.
(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.
(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.

At that point, they stopped their thinking, though. They chose not to consider the baby’s intrinsic right to its own health—its own life. That the State’s constitution is silent on the baby’s right to life should not be allowed to free up judges, even State Supreme Court Justices, to rule as they wish. Where the law is silent on a matter, no court should be ruling on the matter since by entering that silence it is unavoidably making law in its own name, and that is the sole province of the political arms, the arms elected by the people, to do.

Justice Jo Gray implied as much when, in her dissent, she used to same Article and Section to argue the definition of “reasonable and necessary restrictions” is too vague and so the matter should have been returned to the legislature for clarification. Sadly, Gray also chose to elide any consideration of the baby’s welfare, also.

The court’s ruling can be read here.