Wisconsin attorney general says national abortion ban would have ‘enormous consequences’
‘If Congress does pass a ban, people are looking at having their access to safe and legal abortion taken away,’ Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said.
Leaders in Wisconsin are preparing for what President-elect Donald Trump could unleash in the coming months and years with new unchecked powers and Republican majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul told reporters on Nov. 8 that he is preparing to protect Wisconsinites against any harmful policies Trump may enact.
“I know that folks are worried about what the future holds for women’s ability to make their own reproductive health care decisions, about access to affordable health care more broadly, and about whether people may be targeted by the new administration based on their identity, their speech and their viewpoints, or simply for doing their jobs as an election worker or a reporter,” Kaul said.
“So let me be clear: Those kinds of actions are wrong, and we are committed at the Department of Justice to standing up against them. While this election will result in a policy shift at the federal level, it did not change a single word of the U.S. Constitution,” he said.
While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, the extreme agenda laid out by the Heritage Foundation and some of his former staff, he still supports many of its goals, such as closing the U.S. Department of Education, ending climate change protections, and conducting mass deportations of immigrants.
While Trump has said he would not support a national ban on abortion, other Republicans in power do support implementing such a ban. Whether Trump will stick to the promises he made during the campaign is unclear: He has a long history of broken promises. During his first campaign, for example, Trump vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with his own health care plan, but he never did. Trump also promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it; the parts of the border barrier that were built during his presidency, mostly to replace existing portions that had deteriorated, were not paid for by Mexico. On abortion specifically, Trump’s stance has flip-flopped over the years, and he has taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade.
Kaul said there would be little he could do to protect access to abortion in Wisconsin if a national abortion ban was enacted because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped away all constitutional protection of the right to abortion.
“The passage of a federal abortion ban would have enormous consequences for abortion access in Wisconsin, and in other states where there currently is access,” Kaul said. “So I don’t want to give people false hope that if there is a federal abortion ban passed that there’s likely to be a successful legal challenge. I think on the contrary, if Congress does pass a ban, people are looking at having their access to safe and legal abortion taken away. I don’t want to see that happen.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Nov. 11 in a lawsuit challenging an 1849 law that was first interpreted as banning most abortions in Wisconsin after Roe was overturned. A Dane County judge ruled in 2023, however, that that law pertained to a feticide that might occur if a pregnant woman is attacked, not to consensual abortion procedures, and the state Supreme Court is now hearing an appeal of that ruling.
The court is expected to rule on the case in the coming weeks. The makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court could change by next spring following an election scheduled in April to fill a seat left open by retiring liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.
