Beliefs about whether abortions should be legal are deeply entrenched. As restrictions are being challenged in courts across our region, two women on opposite sides of the issue shared what led them to what they believe.
For both of them, it began with a pregnancy.
‘It was a baby’
Marti Halverson sat in the community center in her two-square-mile community of Etna in western Wyoming. She was sporting a silver bob with a fringe of bangs and a black vest with a distinct gold pin on it.
“It says GOP,” Halverson said. “I think we’re pretty clear I’m a Republican.”
She said she’s been one since her father gave the information for her birth certificate.
“He said, ‘Yeah, boy, girl, boy, girl. Where do I put Republican?’” Halverson said proudly, as if she’s told that story hundreds of times.
Hanging from the pin was a pair of tiny, gold feet.
“We wear this to remind ourselves that these perfectly formed feet are 10 weeks after conception,” Halverson said.
She’s the leader of advocacy group Wyoming Right to Life and a former state lawmaker. Halverson is a staunch abortion opponent, but it wasn’t always that way.
“It was in 1973 that I first got pregnant,” she recalled. “I was 21.”
She and her husband hadn’t planned to start a family for a couple years.
“But accidents happen and my doctor gleefully informed me that I could have an abortion,” Halverson said. “I had to ask her, ‘What is an abortion?’”
Just a few months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had recognized womens’ right to an abortion in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, yet this had not been a topic in Halverson’s household.
“When she explained it to me, I was mortified,” Halverson said. “Even though our baby wasn't planned. It was a baby. It was there. There was no getting around it, no escaping it, and killing it was out of the question.”
She quickly found another doctor and went through with her pregnancy.
Shuffling through a stack of pamphlets and studies that support her beliefs, Halverson said her Christian faith has nothing to do with her opposition to abortion.
“It is science driven,” she said. “Life begins at conception.”
But that’s something Wyomingites are debating. Abortion remains legal in the state, but the Wyoming Supreme Court is considering if the government can ban the practice in most cases. It’s one of many states, including Utah and Idaho, where abortion access has been reconsidered after Roe was overturned three years ago.
‘This is my daughter’s legacy’
Another Wyoming resident, Riata Little Walker, used to be opposed to abortion.
“ I would've always said that I was pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest and danger to the mother,” Walker recalled, while sitting cross-legged on her brown leather sectional on the east side of the state in Casper.
She said she was raised Catholic and conservative on a family ranch, but her beliefs were challenged in 2020, when she and her husband were pregnant with their first daughter.
“I got a call from my doctor,” Walker said. “She said, ‘You’re now high-risk.’”
Walker had just had a 21-week scan.
“She had heart defects,” Walker said. “We were told, if you make it to term and if she survives birth, then she'll have a very complex existence … it really hit me that, oh my gosh, she's never leaving a hospital.”
Then the young couple was given the same option as Halverson.
“Ultimately we made the decision based off of her heart,” Walker explained. “She did not deserve to suffer and die in a painful way.”
So Walker and her husband decided to have an abortion and induce labor early.
“I held her in her final few minutes of her life,” Walker said. “We had her baptized right there.”
A matter of freedom
She now has two healthy kids, aged 4 and 1, but keeps her first daughter close in a little bronze heart-shaped urn.
“Google AI says that I'm an abortion advocate … something I never thought that I would ever be,” Walker said. “In my mind, this is my daughter's legacy.”
She said that if she wants people like her to have the right to choose, everyone should have that right.
“And so now I say I err on the side of freedom,” she explained.
For Halverson, the issue is also about that same traditional conservative value of freedom.
“What about the freedom for the baby?” she asked. “What about the freedom for that life?”
Wyoming justices have until late summer to make a decision on the state’s abortion bans.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
