MADISON, Wis. (CN) — Planned Parenthood’s Wisconsin chapter asked the state's highest court Thursday to interpret a state abortion law as unconstitutional, which if done would effectively protect the constitutional right to abortion in the state.
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s petition filed directly with the Wisconsin Supreme Court contends the statute first enacted in 1849 — which state Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, is also challenging in court — violates both patients' and doctors’ rights to life and liberty and equal protection under Article I, Section 1 of the Wisconsin Constitution.
The reproductive and sexual health care group says in its petition that “at the sacred core of the inherent right to life and liberty lies the right to determine what one does with one’s own body, including whether and when to have a child. All people in Wisconsin share that right equally.”
Protecting life and liberty also means protecting one’s right “to pursue one’s lawful profession,” the group argues in the lawsuit, and physicians who perform abortions deserve the same fundamental right to care for their patients according to accepted medical standards and ethics as physicians who do not.
“We are asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to answer the question: does the Wisconsin Constitution protect the right to bodily integrity, autonomy and self-determination — including the decision of whether and when to have a child," said Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s chief strategy officer Michelle Velasquez in a statement. "Answering this question necessarily includes asking the court if the Wisconsin Constitution protects access to abortion care and a health care provider’s right to provide this care. We think it does.”
The state law in question bans abortions in all circumstances except to save the life of the mother. It briefly became the law of the land once the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, which prompted Kaul’s lawsuit days later.
But abortion care is currently available at Wisconsin’s three abortion clinics in Milwaukee, Madison and Sheboygan ever since Dane County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schlipper, presiding over Kaul’s lawsuit at the circuit court level, found in a decision this past July that the disputed law only applies to feticide, not elective abortions.
Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski appealed Schlipper’s decision in December, sending the case to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. On Tuesday, however, he filed a petition seeking to bypass the appellate court and take the case straight to the state Supreme Court. The high court has not yet said whether it will take the case from the lower court, though the lawsuit will certainly land before the justices at some point.
Since Kaul’s lawsuit seeks to scrap the 1849 law largely on statutory interpretation grounds, the high court can decide Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit’s constitutional questions either before it considers Kaul’s case or at the same time, the group says.
Velasquez echoed this argument in Planned Parenthood’s statement, saying the group thinks their case “complements” Kaul’s case.
Dr. Allison Linton, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s chief medical officer and one of the plaintiffs in the group’s lawsuit, said in the same statement that “protecting the right to abortion care in Wisconsin is vital to the ability of doctors like me to care for our patients.”
“Every day that goes by without a constitutional protection for abortion access means an uncertain future for the next patient experiencing pregnancy complications or the college student whose birth control fails,” Linton said.
Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Dr. Kathy King, the medical director of the health care group’s Wisconsin chapter, as well as four women known by pseudonyms who received abortions for unintended pregnancies in 2008, 2014 and 2016, respectively.
Defendants in the lawsuit include Urmanski, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. The three elected officials are also the defendants in Kaul’s lawsuit.
Urmanski is the only one of the three district attorneys who maintains that the disputed law is a near-total ban on abortion and has said he would enforce it.
Planned Parenthood is represented in its lawsuit by attorneys including Diane Welsh, a partner at the Madison-based firm Pines Bach.
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