MADISON, Wis. (CN) — Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin introduced a bill Friday seeking a statewide referendum on a 14-week abortion ban.
The legislation, known as Assembly Bill 975, was quietly rolled out without being circulated for co-sponsorship, and a public hearing at the Legislature’s Committee on Health, Aging and Long-Term Care on the matter is scheduled for Monday afternoon. The committee, like the Legislature at large, is controlled by a Republican majority.
The bill would reduce by six weeks current state law’s prohibition on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and continue the current law’s sole exception for medical emergencies, meaning conditions that threaten the mother’s life or create “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of one or more of the woman’s major bodily functions.”
If the bill passes, it would theoretically put a binding referendum question on the April 2024 ballot asking whether the bill’s provisions should take effect “thus prohibiting under Wisconsin statutes an abortion if the probable postfertilization age of the unborn child is 14 or more weeks, except in the case of a medical emergency?”
The change in the law would only take effect if approved by voters. If they do, the measure would go into effect the following day.
The office of Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, responded to a request for comment by emailing a statement he made in December when Republicans first floated their proposal. In it, Evers said he would veto "any bill that makes reproductive health care any less accessible for Wisconsinites than it is right now.”
State Representative Amanda Nedweski, a Republican from Pleasant Prairie and lead author of the bill, issued a statement defending the bill’s curtailing of abortion access.
“Abortion up until birth is the extreme, and allowing abortion well into the second trimester is rare throughout the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world. Wisconsin’s current law is an outlier,” Nedweski said. “Empowering the people of Wisconsin to affect abortion law directly in a referendum can save many lives by moving the gestational age from 20 to 14 weeks.”
Introduction of the 14-week ban bill comes amid a legal fight over a state law from 1849 that effectively banned all abortions in the state once the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to the procedure in June 2022. State Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, sued to invalidate the 1849 law shortly after the Dobbs decision was issued.
In Kaul’s lawsuit, a Dane County Circuit Court judge declared on Dec. 5 that the more than 150-year-old statute does not apply to elective abortions, only feticide. One the defendants in the lawsuit, Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski, appealed the judge’s decision later that month, and the case is currently in briefing at the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
Urmanski said at the time of his appeal that he planned to ask the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take the case from the appellate court on an expedited basis. Either way, the case will end up before the high court, which as of last year has a liberal majority for the first time in more than a decade.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022, 14 states currently enforce total bans on abortions, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Forty-three states currently prohibit the procedure at some point during pregnancy, including states like Georgia and South Carolina where it is banned after six weeks of pregnancy with some exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The Dobbs decision effectively shuttered Wisconsin’s three abortion clinics in Madison, Milwaukee and Sheboygan, but only temporarily. In light of rulings in Kaul’s lawsuit, all three clinics have resumed abortion services as of late last month.
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