"In 2012, voters in Wyoming were asked to approve on three changes to the state constitution: to preserve the right to hunt, fish, and trap; to expand the power of certain judicial employees; and to establish citizens' authority to determine their own health-care choices. Billed as the Health Care Freedom Amendment, the measure was designed as a rebuke to the Affordable Care Act, the federal health-care law that had been enacted two years earlier and largely upheld by the Supreme Court that summer."
"Wyoming is the reddest state in the nation; a place where President Donald Trump won reëlection in 2024 with 71.6 per cent of the vote, and the Wyoming Supreme Court is composed entirely of justices appointed by a Republican governor. (The most recent Democratic governor left office in 2011.) Yet in a long-awaited ruling on Tuesday, the Court, splitting 4-1, struck down two laws, passed in 2023, that imposed a near-total ban on the procedure."
In 2012 Wyoming voters approved a constitutional amendment preserving individual health-care decision rights, passing with seventy-six percent support. The Health Care Freedom Amendment was framed as a rebuke to the Affordable Care Act and stated that each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. Legal experts characterized the measure as largely symbolic with little practical effect. The provision became Article 1, Section 38. In a 4-1 decision, the Wyoming Supreme Court struck down two 2023 laws banning most abortions and banning abortion medication, finding both laws violated the amendment and rejecting the claim that abortion is not health care.
Read at The New Yorker
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