After Wyo. bans abortion, an abortion clinic opens
Veteran of extremist violence fights law while operating on injunction
It was not such an implausible idea, back in 2020, when a philanthropist emailed Julie Burkhart to ask if she would consider opening an abortion clinic in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states.
In fact, Burkhart had the same idea more than a decade earlier, after an anti-abortion extremist killed her boss and mentor, George Tiller, in Wichita, Kan., where he ran one of the nation’s few clinics that provided abortion late in pregnancy.
Tiller’s work had drawn the wrath of the nation’s anti-abortion groups — his clinic had been blockaded, bombed and flooded with a hose before he was shot to death while ushering his regular Sunday church service. When she reopened it instead of moving, the death threats and stalkers shifted to Burkhart.
Running a clinic in a red state had worn her down, and she was looking to put Wichita and all it represented behind her. But if Wyoming was even more conservative than Kansas, she understood that it was more Cowboy State conservatism, shaped by self-reliance and small government, less interested in regulating what people do behind their drapes.
So she said yes.
Then, three months before Burkhart planned to open her clinic in 2022, the Wyoming Legislature, pushed by a new Freedom Caucus, joined a dozen other states in passing a trigger law that would ban abortion as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
After the court ruled, other abortion providers in states with trigger bans moved their clinics to safe havens in Illinois, Maryland or Minnesota. Burkhart pushed on in Wyoming, making her the only person in America to open an abortion clinic in a state that bans abortion.
“I really reject the notion of putting facilities only in the safe states, because the only way we’re going to preserve rights in this country is to go to these really uncomfortable places,” she said in an interview on the drive from her home near Denver to the clinic in Casper.
Instead of finding only resistance, she has encountered the nation’s complex politics of abortion post-Roe.
For all the ways Wyoming is unusual — roughly 600,000 residents, spread across a vast expanse of mountains, high plains and moon-like outcroppings — its recent politics turn out to resemble other red and purple states.
Republicans have fractured, between the Freedom Caucus pushing bans on books and abortion on one side and those who see themselves as defending the state’s more libertarian brand of conservatism on the other.
And as they have watched the consequences of banning abortion, many residents have discovered their views on the issue are more complicated than they previously understood.
Most of all, they do not think it should be up to the government to decide.
“People, when it comes down to very deeply personal issues, and particularly health issues, they’re going to do what they think is right, even if it’s illegal,” said Ogden Driskill, the president of the state Senate.
Jeanette Ward, a state representative who moved to Casper in 2021 to escape what she called the “tyranny” of mask mandates in Illinois during the coronavirus pandemic, argued Wyoming is still “overwhelmingly pro-life.”
“A loud minority would like to imply it is not so,” she added, but the Legislature overwhelmingly passed the abortion ban, and the governor signed it.
Burkhart is operating in that shifting space. Her clinic survives on an injunction from a judge, pending a trial in a lawsuit her clinic and other abortion rights supporters filed against the bans. Staking even a small claim in such a state, she argues, is a way to keep the conversation about abortion rights alive.
For all her refusal to cede ground, Burkhart, now 58, does not come across as a firebrand. She speaks in even tones, her intonation barely changing as she lists the horrors that have shaped her career: “Arson, murder, flooding, stabbing, death threats.”
She brushes off talk of the risks of her work almost passively: “I mean, you know, this is what I’ve decided to do with my life, or what my life decided to do with me.”