Last week, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, unofficially a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, promised that he would sign a ban on abortions after 20 weeks if the GOP-dominated Legislature passed one and that he supports one at the federal level.
Walker’s promise was made via an open letter on his campaign stationery, not through his office as governor.
“I was raised to believe in the sanctity of life and I will always fight to protect it,” the undeclared candidate wrote.
That was a clear indication that Walker’s promise was about his presidential aspirations, said Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin Policy Director Nicole Safar.
“This is about politics for him,” Safar told the Shepherd.
Walker Opposes All Abortions, No Exceptions
If the Legislature delivers for Walker, the bill would add to the governor’s long list of accomplishments for the pro-life movement.
Although Walker doesn’t talk much about being pro-life while in office, he was the first governor to be endorsed by Pro-Life Wisconsin, a fringe group that doesn’t believe in birth control, and he has signed an extraordinary slate of anti-abortion bills since becoming governor in 2011, which he bragged about in his campaign letter.
Walker has defunded Planned Parenthood, called for an audit of family planning clinics, signed a bill requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forcing women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound, and severely threatened the use of medication abortions in the state.
In addition, as reported by the New York Times in February, Walker told Iowa Republicans he supports a “personhood” amendment to the Constitution that would give embryos constitutional rights and make all abortions as well as most if not all types of birth control illegal.
That’s why Walker says that he’s “100% pro-life,” meaning that he opposes all abortions, even in cases of rape, incest or to preserve the health and life of the mother.
Although that position may be a vote-getter in low-turnout elections or among the conservative faction of the Republican Party, Walker wasn’t so keen to promote his 100% anti-abortion stance on the campaign trail last year.
Faced with grim polling against pro-choice Democratic candidate Mary Burke, Walker tried to blur the lines in a 2014 campaign ad in which he stated that he “supported legislation that would increase safety and provide more information to a woman considering her options. That bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”
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He was apparently referring to the bill mandating hospital admitting privileges and pre-abortion ultrasounds—a law that has little to do with leaving the final decision of having an abortion to the woman and her doctor.
Fetal Pain at Issue
A bill hasn’t been produced since Walker asked for it, but state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) is drafting the Senate version. The rationale for the proposed 20-week abortion ban is that the pro-life movement believes that a fetus can feel pain at that time. Just 1.3% of all abortions are performed after 21 weeks, according to Centers for Disease Control data. But social conservatives have seized on alleged fetal pain as a way to whittle away abortion rights in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
Heather Weininger, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, wrote in a statement that the ban would protect “pain-capable unborn children.” (Weininger didn’t respond to the Shepherd’s request to comment for this article.)
State Rep. Andre Jacque (R-DePere) told Wisconsin Public Radio last week that because he believes fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks he wasn’t sure that the bill should include exemptions for cases of rape or incest.
“In those situations, what we have to focus on is can the child feel pain?” Jacque told WPR. “And in all those circumstances, they certainly are. And certainly, you don’t want the child to be punished for the actions of one of the parents.”
But the argument that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks is highly disputed by medical professionals. A 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association review of relevant studies found that there isn’t any conclusive scientific evidence of when a fetus first feels pain and that pain perception likely does not happen before the third trimester. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists also backed up that claim.
Despite the evidence against fetal pain awareness at 20 weeks, the pro-life movement has won 20-week bans in a dozen states and in the Republican-controlled Congress, but they’ve been struck down by the courts when they’ve been litigated. Most recently, West Virginia’s Senate overrode a gubernatorial veto of their ban, while New Mexico’s House approved a ban last week and sent it to that state’s Senate.
Wisconsin hasn’t tried banning abortions after 20 weeks, but it did attempt to regulate them based on the disputed view that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.
During the 2005 session, the Republican-led Legislature passed a bill requiring that doctors inform a woman having an abortion after 20 weeks that the fetus could feel pain from the abortion.
Groups representing medical professionals lobbied against it, including the state chapter of the Wisconsin Academy of Family Physicians, the Wisconsin Medical Society, Wisconsin Nurses Association, the American College of Nurse-Midwives, as well as a number of pro-choice groups.
In contrast, no medical associations supported it, although the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, Wisconsin Right to Life, Pro-Life Wisconsin and anti-gay activist Julaine Appling’s Family Research Institute of Wisconsin lobbied for it.
But then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, vetoed that bill.
“This bill intrudes on the doctor patient relationship in a heavy-handed manner and contravenes the requirement that doctors provide objective and accurate information to their patients,” Doyle wrote in his veto message. “In any case, I trust doctors, not the Legislature, to make medical judgments.”
