Attorney General's Office asks Wyoming Supreme Court to rehear abortion case
JACKSON — The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office wants the Wyoming Supreme Court to reconsider its recent ruling on abortion, arguing that justices made “numerous mistakes or errors of law” and failed to consider that “an unborn baby has a fundamental right to life” under the Wyoming Constitution.
Jay Jerde, the special assistant attorney general who has defended two of the state’s abortion bans for the last three years, filed a petition for a rehearing on Tuesday.
“Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law,” Jerde quoted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in the introduction to the state’s 31-page filing. “For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but ... because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”
The petition comes two weeks after the Wyoming Supreme Court struck down the “Life is A Human Right Act” and the nation’s first medical abortion ban on Jan. 6. Justices heard oral arguments in April 2025 and contemplated the case for nine months.
Ultimately, they sided 4-1 with a decision made by 9th District Court Judge Melissa Owens in 2024. Six women, including health care providers and abortion advocates, filed the lawsuit in Teton County District Court challenging the two laws after the Wyoming Legislature passed them in the winter of 2023.
The plaintiffs argued the laws violated a Wyoming Constitution amendment passed in 2012, which was crafted at the time as an attempt to resist federal mandates from the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” The amendment — Article 1, Section 38 — guarantees that each competent adult has “the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
“Although we recognize the State’s interest in protecting the life that an abortion would end, we conclude the State did not meet its burden of justifying the abortion statutes’ restrictions on a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, as is expressly protected by the Wyoming Constitution,” Chief Justice Lynne J. Boomgaarden wrote in the 67-page opinion.
Now, the state is arguing the Wyoming Supreme Court “abandoned its precedent” when considering a challenge to the constitutionality of a Wyoming law, “and thereby removed an insurmountable legal hurdle for the appellees.”
Jerde outlined other mistakes the state believes the court made in the petition, which came at the request of Gov. Mark Gordon the day the justices’ ruling was published. The Attorney General’s Office immediately agreed and said it would file within the 15 days allowed.
Gordon expressed his “deep disappointment” at the outcome of the abortion case. Not only did he want legal action, he told the Wyoming Legislature to pass a constitutional amendment on abortion to bring before the voters in the upcoming general election.
“This ruling is profoundly unfortunate and sadly only serves to prolong the ultimate and proper resolution of this issue,” he said in a statement on Jan. 6. “This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself. It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote, and I believe it should go before them this fall.”
Many of the Legislature’s most conservative lawmakers responded with enthusiasm and said they were prepared to take on the task this winter. The Legislature’s budget session begins Feb. 9.
This story was published on Jan. 24, 2026.