Susan Crawford for Wisconsin / Schimel for Justice Campaign
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Susan Crawford (left) and Brad Schimel.
Susan Crawford, left, and Brad Schimel face off April 1.
Here’s one way to frame the significance of the April 1 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court: It will determine whether or not abortion remains accessible in Wisconsin.
Two candidates — Susan Crawford and Brad Schimel — are seeking a 10-year term to replace liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. If Crawford wins, liberals will control the court at least through 2028 and state abortion rights will be secure. If Schimel wins, conservatives will have at least a year to constrict or eliminate reproductive choice before liberals have chances, in 2026 and 2027, to win back the majority.
Crawford, 59, is a Dane County circuit court judge who previously worked as a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, as chief legal counsel to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, and as an attorney in private practice. In this latter role, her campaign website bio boasts, she “protected voting and workers’ rights, and represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin to defend access to reproductive health care.” And one of her campaign ads describes her as “a leader who fought for abortion rights.”
Crawford tells Isthmus she believes the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ending the constitutional right to abortion was wrongly decided. It was, she notes, “the first time the court has ever taken away a right that was recognized and long vested under our United States Constitution.” She says it’s “deeply concerning to me when the government starts invading some of those fundamental decisions that men and women make every day about how to live their lives and what’s best for them and their families.”
Schimel, also 59, is a Waukesha County circuit court judge who formerly served as Waukesha County district attorney and state attorney general. His stance on reproductive choice is just as clear.
In 2012, as Waukesha district attorney, Schimel signed on to a Wisconsin Right to Life white paper which proclaimed that Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion law put the state in “the enviable position of being able to immediately protect unborn children once Roe is eliminated.” In 2017, as state attorney general, Schimel attended a conference of the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, where his colleague, Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin, presented “his legal strategy to end Roe,” according to a New York Times report. And during a May 2024 event in Appleton, Schimel “identified himself as firmly pro-life,” according to a local nonprofit group’s published account.
But, as of press time, there is no mention of these views on Schimel’s campaign website, nor has his campaign touted the support he’s received from Pro-Life Wisconsin. An emailed request for a 15-minute phone interview with Schimel was fielded by spokesperson Jacob Fischer, who called to ask what topics would be discussed. Informed that abortion would be a particular focus of inquiry, Fischer finished the call and did not respond to subsequent attempts to arrange an interview.
Schimel’s apparent reluctance to defend his record of being “an anti-abortion warrior,” as the news outlet Urban Milwaukee put it, is understandable. A Marquette Law School Poll taken shortly after the Dobbs decision found that 68% of state residents felt abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
This has created a clear avenue for success in recent state Supreme Court contests. In 2018 and 2020, liberal Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky won after expressing support for reproductive rights. But in 2019, Lisa Neubauer pointedly refused to say whether she was pro-choice, telling Isthmus she wanted to keep “an open mind.” She lost to conservative Brian Hagedorn, still on the court.
Abortion was a key issue in Wisconsin’s last Supreme Court race, in 2023, during the 15-month period when abortion in Wisconsin was completely unavailable, due to that 1849 law. Liberal Janet Protasiewicz trounced conservative Dan Kelly, putting liberals in control of the court for the first time in decades. (Kelly, a former justice who Karofsky sidelined in 2020, once characterized abortion as “a policy that has as its primary purpose harming children.”)
While not saying how she would rule on any given case, Protasiewicz stated her “values are that women have the right to choose.” After she won, GOP lawmakers angrily demanded that Protasiewicz either recuse herself from cases involving abortion and legislative redistricting (another issue she’d weighed in on) or be impeached. That effort collapsed.
In July 2023, Dane County Judge Diane Schlipper ruled that the state’s 1849 law only applied to feticide, or the ending of a woman’s pregnancy against her will. Shortly thereafter, Planned Parenthood resumed performing abortions in Wisconsin.
There are two abortion-related cases currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The first argues that the state’s 1849 law was superseded by other abortion laws. During oral arguments last November, the court’s four liberal justices made it pretty clear how they will rule, with Karofsky telling an attorney defending the law — which he confirmed would require a 12-year-old impregnated by her father to give birth — “I fear that what you are asking this court to do is to sign the death warrants of women and children and pregnant people.”
How the court’s conservatives will rule on this issue is equally predictable. Hagedorn, for his part, in 2005 dubbed Planned Parenthood “a wicked organization…committed to killing babies.”
The other pending case concerns an argument advanced by Planned Parenthood that abortion is a protected right under the state’s constitution. No date has yet been set for oral arguments so it’s not clear whether the matter will be decided by the current liberal-majority court. But even if the court upholds abortion rights before a new justice is sworn in next August, a conservative-led court could reverse these rulings as readily as the current court reversed rulings on legislative redistricting and the use of absentee ballot drop boxes during elections.
While candidates for Supreme Court can weigh in on public issues the state’s Judicial Code of Conduct bars them from “making pledges, promises, or commitments” regarding cases likely to come before the court. Crawford accuses Schimel of doing exactly that, by telling the Appleton audience he thinks the contested 1849 law remains valid. Schimel also purportedly stated he would not, as a Supreme Court justice, oppose adding exceptions to the law for cases involving rape or incest — which in practice means making vicitms of these crimes prove it to skeptical authorities.
Crawford says expressing her own “fundamental value” that women should be able to “make decisions about their own health care and their own bodies” is different: “It’s not in the context of a legal question that might be presented to the court about a particular law.”
If asked to recuse herself from abortion-related cases due to her past ties to Planned Parenthood, Crawford tells Isthmus she will “do the same thing I now do as judge. I will first of all review the judicial code, the rules on conflicts of interest and recusal” and then decide whether recusal is necessary. But she says, “having [a party be] a former client is not a mandated recusal.”
Moreover, Crawford notes that her representation of Planned Parenthood occurred “before the Dobbs decision, when women’s rights were still protected under Roe v. Wade, so the legal framework was very different then.”
Crawford represented Planned Parenthood in challenging, along with the state and national ACLU, a 2013 law signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. This favored GOP strategy for limiting abortion was blocked by a federal district court judge as an unconstitutional infringement; an appellate court twice agreed, the U.S. Supreme Court opted not to hear the case, and Schimel later declared that it was “an honor to have a case named Planned Parenthood vs. Schimel.”
Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t boast about it anymore.
