(LifeSiteNews) – Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey issued a temporary block of Wyoming’s heartbeat-based abortion ban, the latest of several pro-life laws to be held up in the state’s courts.

Fox News reported that Wyoming enacted in March the Human Heartbeat Act, which bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around six weeks), with exceptions for perceived medical threats to the mother’s life or health. 

But on Friday, Forgey ruled the law cannot be enforced while the challenge to its legality works its way through the courts, arguing that the plaintiffs had made a “sufficient showing of probable success” and of “irreparable injury” while “the state defendants did not persuasively argue otherwise.”

The state judiciary has already signaled its likelihood of siding with the abortion industry. In January, the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled 4-1 that the Life Is a Human Right Act (which bans most abortions) and its 2024 ban on so-called “medication” abortions both violated language in Section 38 of the Wyoming Constitution guaranteeing the right of “competent adults” to make “health care decisions,” including the right to pay or accept “direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so,” with the state legislature having only the discretion to “determine reasonable and necessary restrictions” to “protect the health and general welfare of the people.”

This decision effectively read a “right” to abortion in the state constitution, rejecting arguments that abortion is not health care and that, even if it was, the fact would remain that abortion is not strictly a woman’s “own” healthcare decision because it also affects the health of her child, who is a living human from conception, and therefore Section 38 could not cover it.

In response, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon called on lawmakers to “pass and place a clear constitutional amendment on my desk during the upcoming Budget Session” to “trump any and all judicial decisions.” Lawmakers quickly answered the call with Senate Joint Resolution 7, which would have amended Section 38’s language to replace determining “reasonable and necessary restrictions” with determining “what constitutes health care for purposes of this section.” 

But the final vote was 20-11, falling one vote short of the two-thirds majority threshold for advancing to floor debate and final passage (which in turn would have placed the measure on the ballot this fall for voters to decide). Both of the Senate’s two Democrat members voted against it, as did nine Republicans, some of whom insisted they were pro-life but feared unintended implications from the specific language.

Thirteen states ban most abortions starting at conception; another five ban it once a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around six weeks), with additional states imposing a range of later restrictions.

But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.