Wisconsin Abortion Clinic Booked Up After Judge Rules Pre-Civil War 'Abortion Ban' Is Not a Ban

After Wisconsinites went over a year without access to abortion, Planned Parenthood resumed offering abortion services at the organization’s clinics in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday. The news follows a recent ruling from a state judge that determined a pre-Civil War trigger law from 1849—which automatically banned abortion in the state after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—doesn’t actually apply to medical abortion.

“There is no such thing as an ‘1849 Abortion Ban’ in Wisconsin,” Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled in July. She wrote that the law’s language, which states that “any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony,” is referring to “feticide,” not voluntary abortion.

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In the last year, we’ve seen particularly outlandish attempts by top anti-abortion politicians in Wisconsin to justify the archaic law, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) stating at campaign events last fall that he’d support a referendum for abortion rights—if and only if voters stared at embryos and fetuses in jars before casting their ballots. Earlier this year, Republicans in the legislature proposed a bill to seemingly soften the blow of their abortion ban with… a $1,000 tax credit offered to “parents” with “unborn children for whom a fetal heartbeat has been detected”—certainly on the low end for compensation for forced pregnancy, birth, and parenting. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported last fall that Pro-Life Wisconsin intended to use the state’s 1849 ban and its language recognizing the personhood of an “unborn child” as an opening to “ban most common forms of contraception and birth control and prohibit in vitro fertilization.”