Abortion pills will remain legal in Wyoming for now, after a judge ruled Thursday that the state’s law to ban them won’t go into effect July 1 as planned while a lawsuit is underway.

Lawyers for Wyoming failed to demonstrate that allowing the injunction to go into effect on schedule would not harm plaintiffs in the lawsuits until their case is resolved, Teton County Judge Melissa Owens ruled after hearing arguments from both sides .

Meanwhile, those plaintiffs have clearly shown probable success on the merits, Owens said in granting their request to temporarily block the pill ban.

While other states have enacted a de facto ban on the medication by broadly banning abortion, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon signed into law a law in March that made Wyoming the first U.S. state to specifically ban abortion pills.

Two nonprofits, including an abortion clinic that opened in Casper, Wyo, in April. sued along with four women, two of them midwives, to challenge the law. They asked Owens to suspend the ban while their lawsuit plays out.

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The plaintiffs are also suing to stop a near-total ban on abortion enacted in Wyoming in March. Owens also stayed that law and combined the two lawsuits.

Because abortion remains legal in Wyoming, banning abortion pills would require women to have more invasive surgical abortions instead, Marci Bramlet, an attorney for the ban’s opponents, told Owens at Thursday’s hearing.

It effectively tells people that you need open-heart surgery if a stent would suffice, Bramlet said.

A state constitutional amendment passed in 2012 also played a role in lawsuits. The amendment passed in response to the federal Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, says Wyoming residents have the right to make their own healthcare decisions.

Wyoming’s new abortion laws allow exceptions to save lives and for rape or incest cases reported to police. But Jay Jerde, a state attorney, argued that abortion for other reasons is not considered health care under the amendment.

It doesn’t restore a woman’s body from pain, injury or physical illness, Jerde said. Medical services are involved, but having an abortion for reasons other than health care cannot be a medical decision.

Pregnancy brings pain and illness, Owens noted. But that’s why women don’t get abortions, Jerde countered.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs later questioned how the state could know the motives of those seeking abortions.

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Wyoming’s new laws came into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Roe v. Wade turned down last year. Since then, about 25 million women and teens have been subject to stricter controls on terminating their pregnancies or a near-total ban on the procedure.

While other states have enacted de facto bans on the medication by broadly banning abortion, Wyoming is the first and only state to attempt to ban the pills specifically. The US Supreme Court ruled in April that access to one of the two pills, mifepristone, can continue while litigants try to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval.

The plaintiffs in the Wyoming abortion lawsuits include Wellspring Health Access, which opened in April after a 2022 arson attack as Wyoming’s first full-service abortion clinic in years. Wellspring’s services include pill-assisted abortions.

Medical abortion is safe, effective and has been approved by the FDA for more than two decades. Abortion pills account for more than half of all abortions in the United States, and we are proud to provide drug-induced abortion at our Casper facility to patients throughout the Mountain West, Wellspring president Julie Burkhart said in a statement. she praised the statement.

Previously, only one other clinic in Wyoming, a women’s health center in Jackson, about 250 miles away, offered pilabortions.

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Wyoming officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but had previously pledged to vigorously defend the legality of the new laws.

In recent years, abortions involving two types of pills, usually taken days apart, have become the preferred method of terminating pregnancies in the United States, in part because the process is less invasive than surgical abortions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, 13 states have enacted blanket abortion bans, including drug-induced abortion, and 15 states already had limited access to the pills.

Judge Owens has now blocked three abortion bans signed by Gordon, the Republican governor who nominated her, starting with an abortion ban that was due to take effect last summer.

It serves GOP-dominated Sublette and Fremont counties, as well as Teton County, an ultra-rich and less conservative area.