MADISON, Wis. -- The Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday on whether a law that legislators adopted more than a decade before the Civil War bans abortion and can still be enforced. Abortion rights advocates stand an excellent chance of prevailing, given that liberal justices control the court and one of them remarked on the campaign trail that she supports abortion rights.
Monday's arguments are little more than a formality ahead of a ruling, which is expected to take weeks. Wisconsin lawmakers passed the state's first prohibition on abortion in 1849. That law stated that anyone who killed a fetus unless the act was to save the mother's life was guilty of manslaughter.
Legislators passed statutes about a decade later that prohibited a woman from attempting to obtain her own miscarriage. In the 1950s, lawmakers revised the law's language to make killing an unborn child or killing the mother with the intent of destroying her unborn child a felony. The revisions allowed a doctor in consultation with two other physicians to perform an abortion to save the mother's life.
The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1973 Roe v.
Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide nullified the Wisconsin ban, but legislators never repealed it. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, conservatives argued that the Wisconsin ban was enforceable again. Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit challenging the law in 2022 .
He argued that a 1985 Wisconsin law that .
