The recent decision by the Wyoming Supreme Court to strike down the state’s abortion restrictions rests on a pivotal claim: that abortion falls within a constitutional right to make one’s own healthcare decisions. That framing is not merely a legal conclusion. It’s a moral assertion with sweeping consequences. And it is, in most cases, profoundly mistaken.

At its core, healthcare is ordered toward healing, protecting, or restoring the life and well-being of a patient. Abortion, by contrast, intentionally ends the life of a distinct, developing human being. To label that act “healthcare” requires a moral sleight of hand that redefines medicine away from its life-preserving purpose and recasts the destruction of life as therapeutic simply because it’s chosen. The Wyoming court’s ruling therefore does not merely interpret constitutional language; it enshrines a philosophical judgment that elevates autonomy over the most basic ethical duty to protect innocent life.

Autonomy Without Moral Limits Is Not Justice

The court grounded its decision in a broadly worded constitutional amendment affirming a right to make personal healthcare decisions. Yet rights language, severed from moral truth, becomes dangerously elastic. If every deeply personal choice is insulated from moral scrutiny by being labeled “healthcare,” then the law no longer distinguishes between acts that heal and acts that harm. The unborn child disappears from view, not because it doesn’t exist, but because acknowledging that life would complicate the autonomy-centered framework the court has adopted.

This is where the ruling reveals its deepest flaw. It assumes the moral question is already settled: that abortion concerns only the woman and her body. Biology and reason say otherwise. From the earliest stages, the unborn child is a genetically distinct human being, not a potential life but a life with potential. Any legal regime that calls the deliberate ending of that life “healthcare” has quietly decided that some human lives are unworthy of legal protection.

The Lessons of Genesis: Judgment, Authority, and the Sanctity of Life

In Genesis 7:4, God announces impending judgment with clarity and restraint. The flood does not arrive impulsively or without warning. There’s a fixed interval, a period of patience, and a clear declaration of what’s coming. Judgment, in the biblical worldview, isn’t arbitrary power but moral authority exercised by the Creator over His creation.

That passage underscores a truth modern legal reasoning often resists: life belongs ultimately to God, not to autonomous human choice. The flood narrative is not about cruelty but about moral accountability in a world that had grown indifferent to violence and the destruction of life. God’s authority to give and take life is grounded in His role as Creator. Human beings, by contrast, are stewards, not owners, of life, especially life that’s vulnerable and unable to defend itself.

When courts redefine abortion as healthcare, they effectively invert that order. The strongest party’s will becomes decisive, and the weakest—the unborn child—is rendered invisible. Genesis reminds us that such moral inversions are not neutral. They’re symptomatic of a deeper rebellion against the idea that life has an objective value beyond human preference.

The Illusion of Compassion

Proponents of the ruling often appeal to compassion: difficult circumstances, tragic cases, and complex medical realities. Genuine compassion, however, doesn’t require denying reality. In rare cases, medical interventions that indirectly result in the death of the unborn may be necessary to save a mother’s life, and moral traditions—including Christian ethics—have long recognized that tragic distinction. But those cases are not what define most abortions, which are elective and sought for social, economic, or personal reasons.

Calling those decisions “healthcare” does not heal the moral wound; it anesthetizes the conscience. True compassion seeks solutions that honor both mother and child, even when those solutions are costly, inconvenient, or demanding of communal responsibility. The court’s ruling, by contrast, offers an easier path: remove the child from the equation and declare the problem solved.

A Warning

Like the seven-day warning before the flood, this decision should be read as a warning. It exposes how far legal reasoning can drift when autonomy is treated as the highest good and moral boundaries are dismissed as sectarian or outdated. History shows that societies are judged not only by how they protect freedom, but by whom they choose to protect when freedom conflicts with life.

The Wyoming ruling is not a step forward for justice or healthcare. It’s a reminder that the post-Dobbs era will not be settled merely by returning authority to the states. The deeper struggle is over moral truth itself: whether law will continue to recognize that the most basic duty of justice is to defend innocent human life, or whether it will redefine that duty out of existence.

Genesis teaches that judgment follows when societies persistently call what destroys life good and what protects life burdensome. Yet it also teaches that God, in His patience, provides warning and refuge before judgment falls. For our time, that refuge lies not in clever constitutional language, but in the hard work of recovering a moral vision of medicine, law, and community that once again treats every human life as worthy of protection, especially the smallest and most vulnerable among us.