The legislature has closed a decades-old loophole in Wyoming health law. In 1977, only four years after the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Wyoming’s health laws governing abortions, Governor Edgar Herschler, D-Kemmerer, signed legislation that required “the reporting of every abortion performed or prescribed in” the state of Wyoming.
The law, while taking care to protect the identity of the mother, required abortionists to record: the age of the mother, the type of procedure, any complications, the number of pregnancies, births and abortions in the woman’s history, the length and weight of the child and the type of facility in which the abortion was performed.
As with other laws collecting health data, these statistics are needed to help Wyoming spot unsafe abortion clinics, enforce existing law prohibiting abortions after viability, and learn how best to allocate resources for the benefit of women.
The year the law was passed, the Center for Disease Control thought there were 113 abortions in Wyoming. The year after it was passed, that number jumped to 716. Unless we are to assume that actual abortions jumped by over 600% between 1977 and 1978, it seems the law was addressing a real problem of under-reporting.
Even then, however, the numbers recorded in Wyoming did not match those kept by Planned Parenthood’s research arm, the Guttmacher Institute. Over the next three years, Guttmacher consistently recorded over 1,000 abortions per year while the state of Wyoming only knew of 700 to 800. Then the bottom dropped out.
For the past 38 years Wyoming statistics are spotty, at best. Often, reports filed with the state number in the single digits while Guttmacher continues to report hundreds of abortions in Wyoming every year.
What accounts for this disparity? The answer seems clear. Wyoming reporting law is weak on enforcement. So, while abortionists initially reported at a higher rate, they soon realized that they could ignore the law without penalty.
For decades, Wyoming’s board of medicine has not investigated non-reporting abortionists. Although Wyoming Statute 33-26-401(a) gives them the authority to initiate an investigation, it does not require them to do so.
By 2007 Wyoming’s chronic under-reporting had come to the attention of state legislators. Rep. Bob Brechtel, R-Casper, introduced legislation to provide a penalty for abortionists that did not follow the law. Similar legislation was submitted again in 2009, 2016 and 2017.
All four of these previous attempts to address the problem died without ever seeing debate on the house floor. This year “HB 103 Reporting of abortions” was heard by the House Labor committee and came to the floor with a significant amendment.
The original version of the bill addressed the problem by imposing a late fee of $1,000 for forms that were not submitted within 30 days. It then provided that, after six months, the board of medicine “may” direct the doctor to submit the form or face disciplinary action.
The committee amended that to get rid of the late fee and change the word “may” to “shall.” This compromise solution wisely left the discipline of Wyoming doctors to the board of medicine but now requires the state health officer to report non-reporting doctors.
The bill passed the House (38-21) and went on the pass the Senate (20-9). The Senate added some amendments which further strengthened patient privacy and made clear that reporting abortions does not require the reporting of miscarriages.
During debate, three things stood out.
First, many of the bill’s opponents did not speak against giving the board of medicine investigatory authority. Rather, they opposed the reporting of abortions altogether. But, Wyoming state law already requires reporting of abortions. The passage or failure of this bill would not change that.
A second theme was that there are so few abortions performed in Wyoming that this bill is unnecessary. But opponents of the bill could not cite any data sources that weren’t already tainted.
Since the whole point of the bill was to strengthen the reliability of our current data, it would be a circular argument to cite the currently incomplete data as a reason not to fix the problem of incomplete data.
Third, some said that we already have laws that require reporting. But that was never in dispute. The only question is whether those laws were adequate to assure the citizens of Wyoming that the law was actually being followed. As long as the most reliable estimates are ten or twenty times higher than actual reports to the department of health, nobody has a good reason to be satisfied.
Wyoming has had good reporting law since Governor Herschler signed it in 1977. If Governor Gordon signs HB 103 (now designated HEA 116) the board of medicine will finally be given the authority to enforce it.
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