‘Painful and infuriating nodal point’ Pro-choice advocates march in Wisconsin ahead of pivotal state election

By DIVYA BHARDWAJ the daily northwestern

Content warning: This article contains discussions of unsafe abortions.

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade and seven months after the court overturned that precedent with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, over a thousand protestors filled the Wisconsin state capitol Sunday to advocate for abortion rights.

Immediately after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, one in three American women lost access to abortion. Fourteen states — including Illinois neighbors Wisconsin, Kentucky and Missouri — now ban most abortions, and courts have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in eight others.

Abortion remains legal in Illinois, so people from nearby states with little to no access often travel across state lines to seek abortion care.

“We are a safe haven. We have protections here,” Ali Cassity of Chicago for Abortion Rights said. “But because of that, it’s even more our responsibility to show up for our neighbors. They travel here so often because they have to in order to get the care that they’re looking for.”

In Wisconsin, an 1849 law banning abortion in nearly all cases resumed effect immediately after the Dobbs ruling.

Cassity traveled to Madison on Sunday with other Illinois organizers ahead of Wisconsin’s upcoming Supreme Court election, which will determine the balance of power between conservative and liberal justices and could impact the future of abortion rights.

Madison Abortion & Reproductive Rights Coalition for Healthcare hosted the Sunday protest, working with over 30 Wisconsin and Illinois organizations. Their demands included overturning Wisconsin’s abortion ban; teaching medically sound sex education for all; repealing the federal Hyde

Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortions; diverting Wisconsin’s $6.6 billion tax surplus to the costs for pregnant people seeking care in other states; and re-opening the state’s reproductive healthcare clinics, which were closed by the Wisconsin legislature and state Supreme Court.

Sunsara Taylor and Merle

» See ABORTION RIGHTS , page 6 that this is mine,” said Ivanov, a Classics professor at Northwestern. “At this moment I realized that I am different from other people because I’m interested in this very weird, very separate sphere of life.”

Ivanov studied Classics at Moscow State University for five years before becoming a researcher, and later, a professor at universities in Russia and

» See IVANOV, page 6