Wyoming’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a six-week abortion ban this week, prompting a new lawsuit and some lawmakers calling it “an insult to voters and our institution.”
Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, signed the bill while warning of its constitutional obstacles, noting that previous abortion bans were struck down by the state’s all-Republican-appointed supreme court in January of this year. Almost immediately, an identical group of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the new bill.
This bill effectively makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, a time when many women have not yet found out they are pregnant. Anyone who violates the law will face a felony punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years.
Previous abortion bans, including the first proposed ban on abortion pills in the United States, were previously thrown out by the Wyoming Supreme Court, which cited Wyoming’s constitutional guarantee that adults can make their own decisions about their health care. Democratic Rep. Mike Yin calls this annual cycle of abortion bans “an insult to voters and our institution,” and he doesn’t think there’s much substance to the new bill.
Yin said: “I don’t see why the court would consider this ban any different from an outright ban.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican House Speaker Chip Neiman, said on the House floor that he was not concerned about the bill’s legal complications. Instead, he argued that lawmakers had a moral obligation to promote anti-abortion legislation.
“I know a lot of people come out and are shocked by how we’re creating legislation that gets blocked in the courts,” Neiman said. “But I’ll tell you what, the only person who breaks down is the person who doesn’t do anything.”
Neiman did not respond to The Guardian’s requests for comment.
The cycle of legislate, then litigate is long enough that the new challenge was filed as an amendment to an ongoing lawsuit against previous abortion bans. Katie Knutter, CEO of Wellspring Health Access, one of the plaintiffs and the only procedural abortion clinic operating in the state, said the bill will suspend services at her clinic. She also said that between a previous legislative pause and the clinic surviving an arson attack, Wellspring is used to navigating chaos.
“This is what happens when you fight for abortion care in states that are more politically conservative and hostile to abortion access,” Knutter said, adding that given Wyoming’s vast rural geography, its average patient travels 250 miles to receive care, with about a third coming from out of state.
Kimya Forouzan, senior state policy adviser at the Guttmacher Institute, said the bill’s use of fetal personhood, the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people, is in line with national trends.
“We’ve really seen it come up more and more and be linked very directly to criminal sanctions,” Forouzan said.
The Wyoming legislature’s annual series of abortion bills has seen state politicians follow a plethora of other legislative trends. This includes a bill currently held up in court, requiring a transvaginal ultrasound and a 48-hour waiting period; another would require prohibitively expensive modernizations or relocations of abortion clinics to meet the requirements of ambulatory surgery centers.
The state’s constitutional right to make individual decisions about health care, and the courts’ interpretation of it, has been a thorn in the side of this legislation. A failed 2025 bill that sought to redefine health care and, if passed as originally written, would have banned chemotherapy.
Republican Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, frustrated with the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion, tried unsuccessfully to block additional security funding for courts across the state.
“If this branch of government has a vested interest in protecting your life, why does it suddenly lose that interest when the life in question reaches the unborn?” Rodriguez-Williams said in the living room. Rodriguez-Williams, who also chairs the group Wyoming Freedom, did not respond to a request for comment.
There is one path that could end the back-and-forth between the judicial and legislative branches: draft a constitutional amendment and present it as an election-year ballot for voters to decide. Data from the University of Wyoming suggested that Wyoming voters may be more pro-abortion than their legislators. The 2026 legislature saw a failed attempt to do so, but without mentioning abortion. Instead, he introduced a measure that would allow the legislature to determine the definition of health care.
Republican Rep. Daniel Singh, one of the co-sponsors of the heartbeat bill, has grown tired of this fight. He hopes for a future amendment so that the abortion issue will be resolved, once and for all, by Wyoming voters.
“I’m more of a shooter than a tennis player,” Singh said. “And that’s why I would like to finish and solve this.”
