(LifeSiteNews) — A Wyoming judge granted a preliminary injunction against a law regulating the off-label use of abortion drugs, calling it “Interference with access to healthcare services.”

Enacted in March and intended to take effect this month, HB 164 guarantees physicians’ ability to prescribe federally recognized medications for purposes beyond their officially designated purpose (a longstanding medical practice) but specifically excludes from that protection-controlled substances, sex-change drugs for minors, or drugs “intended to induce an abortion.”

A pro-abortion lawsuit was quickly filed, and Laramie County District Judge Thomas T.C. Campbell issued an injunction against the law on June 30, Wyoming Public Media reported. “Interference with access to healthcare services equates to irreparable harm,” he wrote. “As the Plaintiffs’ evidence demonstrates, the consequences of delayed or denied care are often immediate, non-monetary, and, in many cases, life-altering.”

“ The importance of (the ruling) is that medical providers now can feel protected in what they’re doing,” plaintiff Christine Lichtenfels, executive director of the pro-abortion group Chelsea’s Fund, said in celebration.

The state had attempted to argue that the “bill’s exact wording doesn’t necessarily mean healthcare providers would be at risk of punishment if they use mifepristone for off-label uses, and that the only reason that line was included in the bill was to make it conform with a partial ban on medication abortion from 2023,” Wyoming Public Media said in its report, which Campbell found unconvincing.

Separate Wyoming laws make most surgical abortions illegal as well as prohibit the use of abortion pills for abortions, although they too are currently blocked, in a dispute that is before the Wyoming Supreme Court. Off-label prescribing of abortion pills is a potential loophole that could be exploited to facilitate abortions despite those bans.

Campbell himself has also previously blocked a law requiring ultrasounds before using abortion pills, and one imposing additional regulations on abortion facilities.

Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents with a variety of tactics, especially the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines, regardless of the risks to the women they are supposedly serving.

In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.” 

This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.” A recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.

“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” wrote Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”

Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.