Wyoming abortion ban law put on hold partly due to anti-Obamacare constitutional amendment that guarantees right to make health care decisions

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Oct 17, 2011
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Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.

In many states, opponents of Obamacare effectively took the GOP’s talking points ['death panels' 'government takeover of healthcare'] and turned them into state constitutional amendments protecting patients’ ability to obtain health care that the government might not want them to have. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

Regardless of the political circumstances that led to this amendment being written into the state constitution, [Judge] Owens reasoned that the amendment “unambiguously provides competent Wyoming citizens with the right to make their own health care decisions,” and she was bound by that unambiguous text. “A court,” she wrote, “is not at liberty to assume that the Wyoming voters who adopted” the amendment “did not understand the force of language in the provision.”


Apparently, the state tried to argue that the amendment was only intended to thwart Democratic government, not Republican government.
 
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