Roe V. Wade Overturned: What It Means In Wisconsin

WISCONSIN — The U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, a seismic decision that will gut abortion rights in dozens of states and send a rippling effect throughout the county.

Wisconsin was one of five states where a pre-Roe ban on abortion would likely take affect after the ruling. Other such states included Arizona, Michigan, Alabama and West Virginia.

The law would define an unborn child as a "human being from the time of conception until it is born alive" and make performing an abortion a felony for anyone other than the mother. The law's only exception was for abortions needed to save a mother's life.

See Also: 'Absolutely Unconscionable': WI Officials React To End Of Roe

The Badger State's pre-Roe ban wouldn't be a done deal, National Institute of Reproductive Health President Andrea Miller told Patch. Local prosecutors could choose whether to enforce the law, and legislators could repeal or amend it.

Some Democratic lawmakers vowed to repeal the law, but that's unlikely to happen under the Republican-controlled state Legislature.

Gov. Tony Evers has stated his intention to protect reproductive rights, while gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Kleefisch said she would oppose all abortions.

The Supreme Court's intention to dismiss Roe v. Wade leaked in early May, and more than a thousand protesters gathered in Milwaukee to speak out in favor of reproductive rights. One speaker said that if abortions were banned, people would still get them, but not safely.

RELATED: Reproductive Rights March Draws Over 1,000 To Milwaukee's Downtown

Wisconsinites would have to travel to states Illinois and Minnesota, where abortion is still legal, to get the care they need, Miller said. Minnesota requires mandatory counseling and a 24-hour waiting period.

Rural residents and people of color, who already have limited access to abortion, will be especially burdened, Miller said. "Everyone will be impacted by bans — anyone who can get pregnant and their family members."

Without Roe, Abortion Impossible In Nearly Half Of U.S. States

The court’s repudiation of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and a subsequent case on fetal liability, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was expected. Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a seismic shift in abortion rights.

At least 26 states are certain or likely to make it nearly impossible for a woman to get a procedure that was legal for her mother, grandmother or even great-grandmother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research and policy group.

With the decision, abortion would be illegal or a nearly impossible procedure to get in about half of U.S. states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest and Northern Plains.

Abortion is already illegal or soon will be in 13 states with pre-existing “trigger” laws banning abortion set to take effect with the dismantling of Roe and Casey, and another four are poised to ban it, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nine have so-called fetal heartbeat laws that make the procedure illegal before many women know they are pregnant.

Abortion rights were long considered settled law; and even as conservative states pushed at-the-time unconstitutional fetal heartbeat laws and others restricting abortion access to bring the court to this moment, many legal scholars doubted a right that generations of women and men had counted on was in serious jeopardy.

The case that made it to a full hearing before the court, Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, came after then-President Donald Trump appointed three conservative judges — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, a few months before his term ended, Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September 2020.

The court heard oral arguments on the Mississippi case in December.

Lawyers for the state of Mississippi had proposed an array of mechanisms to uphold the 15-week abortion ban but said the court ultimately should overturn the "egregiously wrong" Roe and Casey rulings.

If the court "does not impose a substantial obstacle to 'a significant number of women' seeking abortions," the state argued at the time, the justices should reinterpret the "undue burden" standard established in Roe and give the state the authority to "prohibit elective abortions before viability" of the fetus.

See Also: Abortion In WI Up To Lawmakers, Prosecutors If Roe V. Wade Overturned