When Politics Overrides Biology

A Narrative Tour of Abortion Bills in the 119th Congress

The invalidation of Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban shows how contested moral worlds, electoral jurisprudence, and shifting gender ideologies converge in a single courtroom moment

Field Journal – 2 July 2025, Madison, Wisconsin

I. Setting and social temperature

Walked the Capitol Square at midday; a swirl of celebratory chants mixed with impromptu prayer circles.

Pro-choice activists carried pink “1849 ≠ 2025” placards, collapsing 176 years of legal time into a memeable slogan.

Across the street a smaller counter-demonstration framed the ruling as apostasy against “God’s blueprint.”

The spatial segregation of protest zones mirrored the state’s recurring red-blue electoral map, rendering the courthouse lawn a micro-cartography representation of polarized lifeworlds.

II. Law as cultural performance

The 4-3 split decision, delivered in measured judicial prose, nevertheless read as dramaturgy: liberal justices narrated a modern biomedical order—doctors, viability thresholds, hospital-radius rules—superseding a nineteenth-century moral code anchored in female self-sacrifice.

The lone dissent invoked “unborn life” as a sacred category, foregrounding how legal texts become vessels for competing cosmologies of personhood.

From an anthropological‐historical perspective “conservatism” has never been a single, all-purpose ethic of conservation; rather, it is a shifting bundle of loyalties that different national parties stitch together to win coalitions.

In the United States (and much of Canada) modern electoral conservatism coalesced in the late-1960s around three pillars that were only loosely related:

Elections, not constitutional amendments, produced the doctrinal pivot; Justice Protasiewicz’s campaign overtly mobilized abortion rights, dissolving the myth of a nonpartisan robe and illustrating how judicial selection in Wisconsin now functions as ritualized referendum on reproductive ideology.

Bottom line

Both camps use the same playbook: identify a galvanizing issue, make judicial elections a proxy referendum, and campaign on outcomes rather than on procedural neutrality.

The result, whichever side prevails, is a bench perceived as carrying an electoral mandate instead of an above-the-fray aura.

Calling that dynamic out isn’t an indictment of only one ideology; it’s a recognition that the structure of state-level judicial elections now rewards overt policy promises—no matter which colour wins.

III. Embodied consequences and moral emotions

In oral arguments prosecutors conceded the law could force a 12-year-old incest survivor to carry a pregnancy making law protect pedophile marriages, apparently a practice paying to defend itself.

That hypothetical child became a symbolic boundary marker—an extreme body onto which each side projected its moral arithmetic of suffering and innocence.

Clinicians describe the 18-month service suspension after Dobbs as “temporal exile,” a period in which cross-state travel (mostly to Illinois) becomes a rite of passage for patients, underscoring how reproductive governance is experienced through corridor geographies rather than abstract jurisprudence.

IV. Temporalities of rights

The majority opinion’s doctrine of “implied repeal” suggests an evolutionary model of statutory layering, portraying the law not as stable bedrock but as archaeological strata.

Activists interpret the win less as an endpoint than as a way-station; speeches quickly shifted to IVF, contraception, and the specter of federal backsliding, revealing a futurity-oriented politics in which rights are perpetually provisional.

Only a handful of human-rights instruments are legally binding on people in the United States; everything else is either aspirational or binding only on the federal government in its dealings abroad.

Start inside the US itself.

The Constitution, as amended, is the primary catalogue of enforceable human rights.

The Bill of Rights guarantees speech, press, religion, assembly, due process, jury trial, and protection from cruel or unusual punishment.

The Reconstruction amendments add equal protection, birth-right citizenship, and a ban on race-based voting exclusions.

Later amendments forbid sex-based voting exclusions, poll taxes, and lower the voting age to 18.

Those provisions are justiciable: you can walk into a federal court and demand their protection.

Beyond the Constitution, Congress has enacted the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act of 2022.

Each transforms a constitutional promise into statutory detail and gives private citizens the right to sue if officials or employers violate the standard.

Internationally the United States has ratified only a few core treaties.

It joined the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992, the Genocide Convention in 1988, the Convention against Torture in 1994, and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 1994.

Each carries the force of federal law under the Supremacy Clause, but the Senate attached reservations that keep those treaties from creating new domestic causes of action; in practice they bind the federal government’s own conduct and influence statutory interpretation, but they rarely let an individual sue directly.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, is not a treaty and therefore has no legal force in any country.

It functions as a soft-law moral benchmark that litigants sometimes cite to give historical context to constitutional clauses, but US courts do not treat it as binding authority.

Likewise the European Convention on Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women remain unratified, so they create no obligations for American officials or citizens.

Finally, every US state constitution contains its own bill of rights—some broader than the federal document—and many states incorporate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights into statutory interpretation as a persuasive aid.

But unless the language of a state constitution or statute mirrors the treaty, the treaty itself does not supply enforceable rights.

In short, the enforceable human-rights baseline for Americans comes from three sources: the federal and state constitutions, congressionally enacted civil-rights statutes, and the handful of ratified treaties that courts treat as self-executing.

Everything else—declarations, unratified conventions, General Assembly resolutions—can shape political rhetoric and advocacy but does not provide a legal shield in a US courtroom.

V. Conclusion

Today’s sunset over the Capitol silhouetted two monuments—the Progressive-Era “Wisconsin Woman” statue and the Gilded-Age dome—signalling the longue durée of gendered citizenship debates.

The court’s ruling functions anthropologically as a social fact: it realigns institutional authority with contemporary kinship, medical, and electoral logics, yet simultaneously intensifies the narrative warfare over whose moral universe the state should embody.

One cluster of proposals hinges on the slogan that a fetal “heartbeat” or “pain” marks the start of personhood.

Measures such as the Heartbeat Protection Act rely on six-week ultrasound motion and on claims of fetal pain at fifteen or twenty weeks.

Cardiology and neuro-science disagree.

What an ultrasound detects that early is a flutter of electrical cells before chambers or valves exist, and pain pathways do not form until roughly twenty-four weeks.

The legislation therefore elevates morally charged lay terms that have little footing in peer-reviewed physiology.

A second family of bills seeks to restrict or outlaw telehealth abortion and the mailing of mifepristone.

Sponsors cite safety, yet two decades of pharmacovigilance place the mifepristone–misoprostol regimen among the safest outpatient drugs.

Large trials and World Health Organization guidance show telehealth dispensing to ten weeks’ gestation is as safe as in-clinic care.

The proposed bans sidestep that record and portray risk levels that mainstream obstetrics does not observe.

Funding-cut measures, including efforts to defund Planned Parenthood or bar Medicaid coverage, almost never invoke medical evidence at all.

They rest on the moral conviction that abortion is not health care, despite longstanding classification by ACOG and the WHO as essential, life-saving care.

Federal audits already separate Title X or Medicaid dollars from abortion services, but the bills treat indirect association as subsidy and move to sever it.

Symbolic bills—those that mandate burial for fetal tissue, lower federal flags on January 22, or criminalize extremely rare “born-alive” scenarios—carry heavy rhetorical force while addressing problems that public-health data show to be negligible.

Existing homicide and tissue-disposal laws already cover the conduct they target; the new language instead imposes cult-like rituals, ceremonies or criminal penalties whose main effect is stigma and fear.

Finally, data-reporting and ultrasound-consent bills compel additional hurdles for providers and patients even though forty-six states already submit CDC-compatible abortion statistics and professional guidelines call for ultrasounds only when clinically indicated.

Research finds mandated viewing delays care without altering decisions or improving outcomes.

Across the docket, then, science rarely drives the line-drawing.

Biological thresholds are chosen for emotional resonance rather than physiological meaning; safety concerns are marshalled selectively when they reinforce a pre-set moral goal; economic levers and symbolic acts dominate where evidence is thin.

In short, the legislative landscape reflects a contest over values, not an effort to align law with established medicine.

Theme / Example Bills Claimed Rationale What Current Medical Evidence Says

Where the Gap Lies “Heartbeat” or “Pain-Capable” bans – e.g., Heartbeat Protection Act (H.R. 682)

A detectable “heartbeat” at ~6 weeks proves fetal personhood; some bills add the claim that the fetus can feel pain at 15 or 20 weeks.

At 6 weeks the sound detected by ultrasound is electrical fluttering in a cell cluster—cardiac valves and chambers have not formed.

Leading reviews (JAMA, BMJ, RCOG) find no cortical pathways for pain before ~24 weeks.

Bills adopt colloquial terms (“heartbeat,” “pain”) that confer moral weight but are not recognized medically.

The cut-offs (6 wks, 15 wks) do not align with consensus neurology or cardiology.

Medication-abortion restrictions / telehealth bans – e.g., Teleabortion Prevention Act (H.R. 729); revoking FDA REMS update (H.R. 679)

Claims of high complication rates and danger of unsupervised use.

Mifepristone + misoprostol has a safety profile comparable to or better than common antibiotics (<1% serious-adverse-event rate).

Large randomized trials and WHO guidance support telehealth dispensing as equally safe through 10 weeks.

Restrictions pig-ignorantly cast aside a 20-year body of peer-reviewed pharmacovigilance data and the FDA’s own post-marketing surveillance.

Risk portrayal is disproportionate to observed outcomes.

National defunding or insurance bans – e.g., Defund Planned Parenthood Act (H.R. 271 / S. 203); No Abortion Coverage for Medicaid Act (H.R. 719) Argues taxpayer money “subsidizes abortion” or that abortion is not health care.

Federal law (Hyde) already bars direct federal abortion funding; audits show Title X and Medicaid reimbursements are segregated from abortion services.

Abortion is classified by ACOG and WHO as essential reproductive health care linked to lower maternal mortality when available.

The bills are primarily redistributive—targeting provider funding, not safety—and deploy economic leverage rather than medical claims.

Fetal remains / burial mandates – e.g., Dignity for Aborted Children Act (H.R. 798 / S. 242)

Positions fetal tissue disposal as a public-health or moral imperative.

CDC guidelines treat first-trimester tissue as medical waste; no infection-control benefit accrues from burial/cremation requirements.

Imposes ceremonies that raise costs and stigmatize patients without measurable health advantage; the driver is moral symbolism, not epidemiology.

“Born-Alive” or “Partial-Birth” bills – e.g., Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 21 / S. 6) Implies live-birth infants are being denied care after failed abortions.

CDC records extremely rare (<0.1%) cases, almost all in severe fetal anomalies or pre-viability ruptures; existing homicide statutes already apply.

Creates redundant criminal penalties; problem it purports to fix is statistically negligible, but political resonance is high.

Data-reporting & ultrasound mandates – e.g., Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (H.R. 48); Accurate Abortion Data bills Claims patients lack information and states lack accurate statistics.

ACOG ethics guidelines state ultrasounds should be clinically indicated, not legislatively compelled; coercive viewing laws are shown to delay care without altering decisions.

46 states already collect CDC-compatible abortion data; completeness issues stem from state policies, not federal absence.

Evidence shows mandates add barriers and no clinical benefit; data bills duplicate frameworks already in place.