There’s a small, unremarkable beige building in downtown Casper, the heart of Wyoming’s oil country, tucked between a Sinclair gas station and a local dry cleaner. Most days of the week, the building attracts a small throng of protesters.
In May 2022, it was burned down just three weeks before a new business was set to open in the building. Since it finally opened in 2023, Wyoming lawmakers have passed a number of laws designed specifically to shut it down.
Wyoming’s 2025 legislative session, which has just ended, has brought them closer than ever to succeeding in obstructing the work of Wellspring Health Access, the state’s only full-service abortion clinic.
Near-total abortion bans went into effect in Wyoming after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, but a Wyoming district court judge overturned the bans last year citing the state’s constitutionally guaranteed right to healthcare access. The case – brought by Wellspring – is currently in the hands of the Wyoming supreme court.
Due to an injunction, Wellspring was able to operate during the prolonged legal battle. That changed last week, when the conservative legislature passed a law requiring facilities providing in-clinic abortions meet the regulatory requirements of ambulatory surgical centers, which have entirely different building codes and regulations, requiring a prohibitively expensive relocation. The law would also require doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 10 miles, which is more stringent than its codes for ambulatory surgical centers.
Another law mandates a transvaginal ultrasound and 48-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions, and was passed after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto on Thursday.
In the meantime, the clinic has paused services for all patients.
Wellspring is back in familiar territory – the Wyoming courts – and has filed a lawsuit against both bills.
“We’re quite disappointed in the legislature. We saw it coming, but it’s still disappointing,” said Julie Burkhart, Wellspring’s president.
The laws are designated by reproductive law experts as Trap laws, anti-abortion policies to chip away at abortion access when a full ban is out of reach. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has opposed legislation identical to Wyoming’s ambulatory surgical center bill, and opposes ultrasound requirements.
Republican speaker of the house Chip Neiman was the main sponsor of this session’s ultrasound bill. While Neiman insists the reasoning behind the bill is medical, he admitted during a floor debate this session that his bill also intended to make women “reconsider” their abortions.
When asked by the Guardian how he reached a medical position opposed by major medical associations, Neiman opened by talking about the sanctity of life.
“That’s a human being,” Neiman said.
Neiman continued his answer on his medical position by talking about anti animal-cruelty legislation, an anecdote about a fellow legislator who knew two women who had abortions 40 years ago and said they were severely distraught afterwards, and his belief in abortion bans without exceptions, saying that he favors the death penalty for men who rape women.
“There’s more to it than just getting rid of an inconvenience, you know, or something that’s going to impact, your financial, or through rape or incest or whatever,” Neiman said. “I get that that’s traumatic. I believe anybody that perpetrates that on a woman, to me, the death penalty is the best answer.”
The new laws would require Wellspring to completely restructure the clinic’s operations. At the moment, people seeking abortions are largely being referred to Colorado, and Burkhart is working out solutions for those that come for its other services, including IUDs, family planning, oral contraceptives, and general gynecological services.
Wyoming residents may still choose to receive medication abortions from out of state through the mail, thanks to shield laws that offer protections to providers who prescribe pills to people in states with bans. (A doctor in Jackson, Wyoming, previously prescribed the pills but did not respond to questions from the Guardian asking if this is still the case.)
But the loss of the services frozen at Wellspring – which was the only facility in the state providing surgical abortions – will reverberate beyond Casper, the state’s second largest city with a population of under 60,000. Burkhart says the clinic has served people from over 19 states, many coming from states with similarly harsh abortion laws.
“We have a commitment to bringing reproductive health services to under-served and under-resourced areas,” Burkhart said. “I come from an agricultural family in Oklahoma, and so for me, that’s very personal, because no matter where you live in the United States, you deserve access to quality healthcare.”
Burkhart is no stranger to hostile political conditions, having been an adviser for Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was assassinated in 2009 by an anti-abortion extremist. She worries about the protesters outside, who she says are increasingly emboldened by national politics.
“We have a bomb-threat policy. We have an active-shooter policy. These are things that in other businesses, people do not have to think about day to day,” Burkhart said. “Staff have to be alert when they’re out in public. You know, are they being followed? This does not make living life easy.”
While the atmosphere in Wyoming’s legislature is hostile to abortion, data suggests that voters in the Cowboy State feel differently. Polling from the University of Wyoming shows that only 11% of residents believe “abortion should never be permitted”. Another 20% support abortion in cases where “the need has been clearly established”, and nearly 40% believe “women should always have access to abortions as a matter of personal choice”.
Lawmakers filed five bills targeting abortion at the outset of the 2025 legislative session. Some of the more ambitious measures failed, such as a bill that would have regulated abortion pill chemicals in wastewater by making women bag the remains of their miscarriages and a first-of-its kind effort to exempt abortion from the state’s definition of healthcare, that, in its original draft, would have exempted chemotherapy as well.
Burkhart says that her and her staff plan to stay in the fight. After trial by fire with the 2022 arson, she says many people expected her to give up.
“I think people thought, and rightfully so, ‘They’re gonna pack up and go home and call it a day here,’” Burkhart said. “But we dug our heels in even deeper.”