Home » Wisconsin and other states have laws establishing fetal personhood. What could that mean for abortion access and IVF?

Wisconsin and other states have laws establishing fetal personhood. What could that mean for abortion access and IVF?

Wisconsin and other states have laws establishing fetal personhood. What could that mean for abortion access and IVF?

Nearly half of states have laws that use fetal personhood language, according to abortion rights group Pregnancy Justice. These laws aren’t limited to states where abortion is severely restricted or outlawed; purple and blue states where abortion is legal, like Wisconsin, also have similar laws on the books. 

“One of the great questions coming after Dobbs is whether those laws will become enforceable,” said Mary Ziegler, an expert on the history of the abortion debate in the U.S. Dobbs is the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to an abortion. 

Ziegler, a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law, recently spoke to WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” about her new book, “Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction.”