Wisconsin’s leftist Supreme Court just struck down a very old law banning abortions in the state, which went into effect after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade.

In short, the state now allows abortion all the way to the 20th week of pregnancy.

Here’s more from NBC News:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday formally struck down an abortion ban from 1849 that had technically retaken effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights.

In a 4-3 decision that came down along ideological lines, the court’s liberal majority affirmed a lower court ruling that overturned the 176-year-old ban and left in place a more recent law in Wisconsin allowing most abortions until about the 20th week of pregnancy.

“We conclude that comprehensive legislation enacted over the last 50 years regulating in detail the ‘who, what, where, when, and how’ of abortion so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion,” liberal Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote in the majority opinion. “Accordingly, we hold that the legislature impliedly repealed [the 1849 ban] to abortion, and that [that law] therefore does not ban abortion in the State of Wisconsin.”

The ruling is a win for abortion rights activists in the battleground state, where Democrats had put the issue at the forefront of many elections — including two races in 2023 and 2025 that recalibrated the state Supreme Court’s ideological balance — in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The state’s 1849 law — enacted the year after Wisconsin was granted statehood — banned abortion in almost all cases by making performing the procedure a felony. Under the law, doctors who perform the procedure technically faced up to six years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines. The law included an exception for abortion care only to save the life of the woman, but not for her health or for rape or incest.