Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Abortion Crusade

 

By demanding both financial concessions and an end to collective bargaining for his state’s public-sector unions, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker is pushing a far-right agenda, labor groups and Democrats say. Walker won’t negotiate with union leaders, and has even dismissed ideas from other Republicans in the GOP-controlled state senate. But Walker has a history of striking hard-line positions, and nowhere is that more true than on the most controversial social issue of them all: abortion.

Walker’s nearly nine-year record in the Wisconsin Assembly, the legislature’s lower house, reads like a pro-life handbook, an all-out assault on abortion rights. What’s more, the many anti-abortion initiatives he backed are perfectly in sync with the assault on reproductive rights now unfolding on the national level, where House Republicans recently gutted funding for Planned Parenthood and controversially tried to redefine “rape” to limit the long-standing exceptions to the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or to save a mother’s life.

Walker, the son of a minister, attended Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1986 to 1990, where he served as chair of Students for Life. He dropped out of the school without graduating in 1990, and unsuccessfully ran for the Assembly that fall. He ran again in 1993 in a special election and won an Assembly seat representing Wauwatosa, a city just outside of Milwaukee. It didn’t take long for him to take up the abortion fight.

In November 1996, Walker and Assemblywoman Bonnie Ladwig R-Caledonia announced plans to introduce a bill banning “partial-birth” abortions, or what’s medically known as dilation and extraction. Anti-abortion groups have condemned the practice, but groups that back abortion rights argue the procedure could save a woman’s life in the case of severe late-term complications during a pregnancy. Walker said partial-birth abortions are “never needed” to save lives, adding, “This procedure is not a medically recognized procedure.” (NPR has a good explainer of the procedure here.)

Walker’s effort to ban dilation and extraction mirrored an eight-year-long battle on the federal level to ban the practice. That federal fight culminated in 2003 when President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, outlawing the procedure. In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that law.

In 1997, Walker’s abortion crusade continued with a proposal banning state and local government employees from “promoting, encouraging, or counseling in favor of abortion services.” Walker’s proposal would also block “public facilities or public institutions or any equipment or any other physical asset that is owned, leased, or controlled by this state, an agency, or a local government unit” from offering abortions. Public employees would be subject to a $1,000 fine if they discussed abortions. The proposal caused a firestorm because of how it would affect the University of Wisconsin, which didn’t provide abortions but did teach and discuss them. One Democratic Assemblyman, Sheldon Wasserman of Milwaukee, said Walker’s proposal was tantamount to censorship. “It’s an outrageous and extreme position to say we’re not going to teach things to save people’s lives,” Wasserman was quoted as saying in the Capital Times. “Even the most avid pro-life people will say that. I don’t think [Assembly Republicans] know what they’re doing.”

According to the Capital Times, Wisconsin Assembly Republicans also gutted the $4 million budget for family planning resources in Wisconsin, not to mention ending all state funding for Planned Parenthood. They also proposed making it mandatory that parents be notified if their child tried to get a birth control prescription.

On the issue of prescriptions, another bill offered by Walker would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions if they have moral or religious qualms. Targeted at birth control prescriptions, the bill would also block the state pharmacy board from disciplining pharmacists who don’t do their job. At the time, Democrats and pro-choice advocates feared the bill would eventually lead to pharmacies refusing to carry birth control at all. A version of that bill passed after Walker had left to serve as Milwaukee County executive, but then-Governor Jim Doyle vetoed the measure.

Years later, when Walker announced his gubernatorial run, he was embraced by anti-abortion groups. One endorsement in 2010 came from the hard-line group Pro-Life Wisconsin, which doesn’t think abortions should be legal at all under any circumstances, even in the case of rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life. And at a Wisconsin Right to Life convention in April 2010, Walker praised a county prosecutor who had threatened teachers for using a sex education curriculum implemented by Democratic Governor Jim Doyle that allowed for the discussion of birth control, sexually transmitted infections, and other related subjects. (A Walker campaign staffer told the Associated Press that Walker considered his “pro-life” views mainstream.)

Pro-choice groups also fear that a health care-related proposal in Walker’s “budget repair” bill could be a stealthy attack on abortion rights. The law would give emergency rulemaking power over the state’s low-income health care programs to the unelected Health Services department secretary, letting that official bypass the legislature. Amanda Harrington of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin says she worries that Walker could use the change as a way to further attack abortion rights in Wisconsin. (A spokesman for Walker did not respond to a request for comment.) Wisconsin Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus currently cover abortions in certain situations, including in the cases of rape, incest, or to save a woman’s life. “He has really shown across the board opposition to women’s health,” Harrington says. She doesn’t expect that to change.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate