Wyoming on Friday turned the first state within the nation to particularly ban abortion capsules, as Republican Governor Mark Gordon signed a regulation making it unlawful to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, promote or use any drug for the aim of procuring or performing an abortion.”
“My promise to guard the unborn has been fulfilled,” State Senator Tim Salazar, the sponsor of the laws, wrote on social media Friday, noting that nearly all abortions in Wyoming are treatment abortions.
The regulation, which takes impact in July, carries as much as six months imprisonment, as much as $9,000 in fines, and contains restricted exceptions, together with utilizing such treatment to deal with “pure miscarriage.” Along with the abortion capsule ban on Friday, Gordon — one among a number of GOP governors to signal a “set off ban” on abortion after the Supreme Court docket’s Dobbs ruling final yr — allowed one other invoice proscribing abortion to be enacted with out his signature, although he cautioned that laws may get hung up in a courtroom battle. “I perceive the Legislature’s effort to enhance Wyoming’s pro-life authorized framework and preemptively make clear a few of these authorized questions,” Gordon wrote in a letter to Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Grey. “Nonetheless, I imagine this query must be determined as quickly as attainable in order that the difficulty of abortion in Wyoming might be lastly resolved.”
Remedy abortion has been the entrance line of the struggle for reproductive well being care because the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade final June. The Biden administration has sought to develop entry to abortion capsules as a way to restore entry to abortion in states the place the process has been banned or severely restricted. The anti-choice motion and its Republican allies, in the meantime, have made the drugs — which account for greater than half of abortions in America — their subsequent goal. Certainly, Republicans have pressured Walgreens and different pharmacies towards providing abortion capsules by mail and eyed state bans on the medication, whereas far-right anti-abortion teams are difficult the Meals and Drug Administration’s two-decade approval of mifepristone, one among two drugs used to terminate pregnancies. Texas decide Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, an extremist Donald Trump appointee, heard oral arguments in that case earlier this week and a ruling is predicted quickly.
Limiting entry to abortion capsules, as Wyoming now has, may have dramatic implications for reproductive well being care in America. “An individual’s well being, not politics, ought to information necessary medical choices — together with the choice to have an abortion,” Antonio Serrano, advocacy director on the ACLU of Wyoming, stated in a assertion Friday. “Gov. Gordon’s choices…are disappointing, however the struggle for abortion rights in Wyoming isn’t over. We’ll proceed to problem efforts opposite to our proper to make our personal reproductive well being care choices.”
