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A college student who set fire to a building that was set to be Wyoming’s only full service abortion clinic was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison, US media reported.
Lorna Roxanne Green had admitted to breaking into Wellspring Health Access in Casper and spreading gasoline around it in May of last year, just a few weeks before it had been due to open.
Green, 22, told police “she did not like abortion and was having nightmares which she attributed to her anxiety about the abortion clinic opening, so she decided to burn the building,” court documents said, according to Oil City News, a Wyoming publication.
She had faced up to 20 years’ imprisonment for arson but following her guilty plea was given five years and ordered to pay $273,000 restitution, Oil City News said.
The clinic’s opening was delayed by several weeks because of damage, imperiling access to the procedure in conservative Wyoming.
Abortion remains legal in the state, but it is one of several where Republican lawmakers are trying to restrict it.
Despite majority public support for abortion access, conservative politicians and their evangelical supporters have made inroads in recent months in restricting access to the procedure in several parts of the United States.
Last year the US Supreme Court overturned a decades-old ruling that had enshrined a woman’s right to an abortion.
hg/acb