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Slider photo by John Premble Photo by Tanner Cole — Wisconsin citizens testify on Wisconsin Assembly Bill 237 during its public committee debate on June 2.
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Slider photo by John Premble
Photo by Tanner Cole — Wisconsin citizens testify on Wisconsin Assembly Bill 237 during its public committee debate on June 2.
It’s hard to keep up with the pace of destruction in Wisconsin. Every day there are hearings featuring tearful testimony from citizens worried about the attacks on public schools, the university, environmental protections, and women’s health.
These hearings have settled into a familiar script: Stony-faced Republicans, who hold the majority in the state legislature, wait out the public testimony and the outraged speeches from Democrats, then pass their proposals out of committee on a straight party-line vote.
So it was with Wisconsin’s fast-tracked 20-week abortion ban, which passed the Senate health committee this week.
Scott Walker has said he will sign the ban, despite opposition from every medical organization in the state, including Wisconsin’s obstetricians and gynecologists, pediatricians, and family physicians.
Touting his anti-women’s-health record, Walker bragged to conservative talk radio host Dana Loetsch, “We defunded Planned Parenthood. We signed a law that requires an ultrasound.”
Forced, transvaginal ultrasounds for women who seek abortions make sense, Walker said, because who doesn’t love ultrasound pictures?
“I find people all the time who'll get out their iPhone and show me a picture of their grandkids' ultrasound and how excited they are, so that's a lovely thing,” Walker told Loetsch. “I think about my sons are 19 and 20, you know we still have their first ultrasound picture. It's just a cool thing out there.”
Never mind that women who are seeking abortions will not find unwanted ultrasound pictures “just a cool thing.” Nor will these pictures be the “lovely” twenty-week ultrasound images Walker conjures up.
In most cases—about 90 percent of the time—women who are forced to undergo ultrasound before an abortion will be in a much earlier stage of pregnancy, and many will be required to undergo an invasive vaginal probe to look at an image of the early-stage fetus they’ve decided to abort.
Among the 1 percent of women seeking abortions who would be affected by Wisconsin’s 20-week ban, officially known as the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” many will have had the wrenching experience of learning that there is something severely wrong with the fetus they are carrying.
"Imagine hearing your daughter is going to die and there's nothing you can do," Briel Vanderwerff testified before the joint health committee this week, describing how she found out from an ultrasound image that her fetus was missing part of her brain and was growing cysts all over her body. "You're supposed to be excited about those images, but I was heartbroken."
Only 89 women had abortions at the stage of pregnancy covered by the 20-week ban in 2013, Nicole Safar of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin points out: “It doesn’t impact many people. But for those women and families, the impact is going to be so devastating.”
“Neither my husband nor I are callous. Neither my husband nor I are stupid,” Jessica Roulette testified, her voice trembling as she told the story of the life-threatening condition she developed during pregnancy. She had blood clots, could breathe only with the help of an oxygen tank, and found out during an emergency room visit that her liver ruptured due to a condition known as HELLP syndrome, which kills 25 percent of pregnant women who develop it.
The only way to save her life, she told the committee, was to deliver the son she and her husband had been hoping for dangerously early, and with severe health problems. “Doctors are not miracle workers, they are just people doing the best they can,” Roulette said, sobbing, adding that the pressure she and her family were under would only be made worse by the threat of imprisonment for her doctors.
“When you seek to shame women into reconsidering the decision to have an abortion, you are disrespecting the gravity with which women make this decision,” Roulette said. “Please respect their intelligence.”
The bill contains no exceptions in cases of rape, incest, nonviable fetuses, or severe health consequences for mothers unless they face imminent death within 24 hours. Doctors face felony charges and criminal penalties of three-and-a-half years in prison, fines, and civil liabilities if they don’t take every step to save the life of a fetus, even if that fetus has a terminal condition, and even if an emergency C-section will adversely affect the health of the mother.
Among the medical objections to the bill are its unscientific definition of “fertilization” as the moment at which a pregnancy begins, and the assertion that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks, a claim which is rejected by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Shelia Plotkin, a retired teacher who testified against the bill, told the joint health committee, “This bill is not about preventing real human pain. It’s about control.”
Ten out of eleven committee members are men, Plotkin pointed out. “You do not get pregnant. . . . You do not have to decide. . . . that pain belongs to women. And you want to multiply it.”
“It’s not about preventing pain. It’s about inflicting more. Shame on you,” Plotkin said. When room broke into spontaneous applause, committee co-chair Senator Leah Vukmir, Republican of Wauwautosa admonished everyone present.
One of the most dramatic moments during the hearing came when committee co-chairman Rep. Joe Sanfelipo confronted Emily Kaminski, a University of Wisconsin social work student.
Kaminski testified about her experience working with rape victims when she volunteered at the local rape crisis center and in a former job at Planned Parenthood.
“Every woman has a different story,” she said, choking up. “I’ve held a lot of women’s hands and listened to them. . . . Women are struggling, socieconomically, in our homes, with education.”
The twenty-week ban, she said, would only make those struggles worse.
“This bill is an opinion being made into law that isn’t right for everyone,” Kaminski said. “This bill doesn’t respect that fact that women are smart.”
Representative Sanfelipo demanded that Kaminski tell him whether Planned Parenthood would counsel women to consider adoption.
Despite her protests that she no longer works for Planned Parenthood and cannot speak for the organization, Sanfelipo persisted.
“I’m just trying to ascertain what types of options you present to people,” he said. “Once a child is feeling pain or viable, what options do you present to women?”
Democrats on the committee objected that Sanfelipo was badgering Kaminski, and she repeated that she was not speaking for Planned Parenthood.
Democrats on the health committee tried repeatedly to get the Republicans sponsors of the bill to clarify how doctors were to balance saving the life of a fetus against saving the life of a mother. Repeatedly, they got the vague answer “reasonable medical judgment.”
When Senator John Erpenbach later tried to insert language clarifying that the life of the mother must come first, Republicans on the Senate executive committee rejected it.
“This bill takes away our ability to make sound medical judgments,” said Dr. Joanna Bisgrove, a family doctor who said delivering babies is her favorite part of her job.
“These women are suffering,” she added, and the bill “will make their suffering worse.”
Chelsea Shields of Pro Life Wisconsin urged the joint health committee to pass the bill, even though it contained an emergency medical exception, and was not “perfect.” It was, she said, “the strongest bill possible” that could hold up in court.
Asked if she meant that a perfect bill would not include an emergency medical provision to save the life of a mother, she said, “In a perfect world, the life of the mother and the unborn child would be held in equal regard.”
The full Senate is likely to take up the bill next week, but it is not scheduled for a vote in the Assembly.
Doctors from all over the state have been contacting legislators to urge them not to pass the ban.
“The more they hear from doctors, the more uncomfortable they are,” said Nicole Safar of Planned Parenthood. “We are not flipping votes, but we are hoping to create enough discomfort that the don’t schedule a floor vote.”
This piece has been updated. The comments previously attributed to Rep. Jesse Kremer were actually made by Rep. Joe Sanfelipo.The Progressive regrets the error.
