Wyoming GOP Bill To Ban Abortion Would Accidentally Ban Chemo

Back in November, Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens struck down Wyoming’s terrible abortion ban for the third time, on the especially satisfying grounds that it violated an amendment to the state constitution meant to save them from horrors of Obamacare that never materialized.

Said amendment read that “[E]very competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

But Wyoming Republicans were not ready to back down yet in their quest to control people’s reproductive futures! So they thought and they thought and then finally they figured out the one weird trick to banning abortion in the state: changing the very definition of healthcare itself.

Senate File 125 reads:

No act, treatment or procedure that causes harm to the heart, respiratory system, central nervous system, brain, skeletal system, jointed or muscled appendages or organ function shall be construed as health care unless documented and medically necessitated to save the life of a pregnant woman or in cases in which a licensed physician has determined and documented that a person has no chance of meaningful recovery.

Unfortunately for them, these things apply to a number of procedures and surgeries that have absolutely nothing to do with banning abortion — including chemotherapy, which causes harm to the body in order to kill cancer cells, or breaking bones in order to reset them. There are also endless medications for which these things are potential side effects.

It’s hard to imagine how that law could be amended to make it just about fetuses. Even if they did, there are a number of medications that could, ostensibly, cause harm to a fetus but also be dangerous for the mother not to take, like some anti-seizure medications that contain valproic acid, lithium, antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia, and so on.

Whoops!

“There’s a slew of medical procedures, surgeries, treatments that can have potentially positive outcomes but may also cause harm in the short period or as an unintended consequence,” Wyoming attorney Abigail Fournier told The Guardian. “It’s scary to me, because I think it could be interpreted to be very limiting in terms of what healthcare providers can do.”

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Senator Cheri Steinmetz, told The Guardian that they just kind of proposed the law as written by some lawyer who sent it in to them, but that they were aware of “the chemotherapy issue.”

“We have the best of intentions, and sometimes bills start out a little rockier than others,” Steinmetz said.

Aw, do they really?

One of the big questions since the fall of Roe has been whether or not abortion ban states will be able to punish those who live in other states for breaking their laws. Louisiana recently became the first state to attempt to criminally charge an out-of-state doctor for mailing abortion pills.

Specifically, Dr. Margaret Carpenter is charged with mailing abortion pills to a mother in Louisiana who, according to police, gave her daughter the pills in order to abort a child she supposedly wanted. (The prosecution’s evidence for this was that the daughter was planning a “reveal party.”) The mother is also being charged by the state.

Louisiana was hoping to extradite Dr. Carpenter, which is almost definitely not going to happen, because of how Louisiana is not the boss of New York.

The thing is, New York, like eight other abortion-protecting states, has an abortion shield law protecting doctors and others from being charged with abortion-related nonsense in other states. Dr. Carpenter is also, as it happens, the first doctor to be civilly charged with the same crime, by Texas AG Ken Paxton.

Over the weekend, New York Governor Kathy Hochul took a break from being largely useless to state, unequivocally, that the state will not be extraditing Dr. Carpenter to Louisiana or anywhere else.

“I will never, under any circumstances, turn this doctor over to the state of Louisiana under any extradition request,” Hochul said, adding that she would “do everything I can to protect this doctor and allow her to continue the work that she’s doing that is so essential.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James responded to the request by stating, “This cowardly attempt out of Louisiana to weaponize the law against out-of-state providers is unjust and un-American.”

It sure is!

Louisiana officials and anti-abortion rights groups in the state are trying to take this situation and make it not about reproductive rights, but about coercion.

Via New York Times:

“The allegations in this case have nothing to do with reproductive health care,” said Liz Murrill, the state attorney general. “This is about coercion. This is about forcing somebody to have an abortion who didn’t want one.” […]

“This case exposes how mail-order abortion drugs are fueling an epidemic of coercion, a new form of domestic violence against mothers and their babies,” Katie Daniel, director of legal affairs for SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement. The statement commended Louisiana for tightening laws against abortion medication and said, “In blue states, pro-abortion politicians are doing the polar opposite, shielding abortionists.”

That would be all well and good, if Dr. Carpenter were in Louisiana forcing teens to take abortion pills, but she isn’t. She is selling pills to people who were, as far as she knew, having their own entirely consensual abortions.

This is a longstanding tactic of the forced birth crowd. In order to avoid sounding like they are anti-woman, they try to make everything about forced or coerced abortions — so that it looks like they don’t think the abortion patients are at fault for the abortions they’re having so much as being forced or coerced into having one, usually by someone with nefarious intentions of some sort.

Obviously, abortion should always be the choice of the person having it, but Dr. Carpenter was no more at fault for said “coercion” than someone would be for selling something else and using it for something other than its intended purpose.

In 2022, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum declaring that those officers who are stationed in states that ban abortion would be reimbursed for any travel expenses they need to go get abortions in other states. Given that soldiers do not choose where they are assigned and are doing us all a favor by serving, this seemed like the only fair solution.

Last Wednesday Jeffrey Register, the director of the Pentagon’s human resources department, issued his own memo declaring this practice over. Well, sort of a memo. More like a copy of the regulation with that part crossed out in red pen.

Austin specifically noted at the time that one of the reasons for doing this was that not doing it would “interfere with our ability to recruit, retain, and maintain the readiness of a highly qualified force.” Which … duh. The military is desperate for people to join up right now and anything that discourages that — like this or efforts to maintain white male supremacy by eliminating DEI training — is not likely to attract many actually qualified candidates.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

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