The lives of pregnant women in Wisconsin are at risk if a new bill passed by Republican senators becomes law.

The bill, SB553, urges every obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) to give patients dangerous C-sections to end perilous pregnancies, asserts Dr. Kristen Lyerly, a Wisconsin-based OB-GYN.

Lyerly says that SB553—which is supported by every Republican senator in the Wisconsin Legislature—reveals the contempt Republicans have for the state’s pregnant women. “They think of women as incubators, not human beings.”

That’s because the bill’s language exhorts physicians to terminate nonviable early pregnancies through “cesarean sections” or “inductions” in order to potentially preserve the life of an “unborn child.”

This would force women into aggressive surgeries or hours of unnecessary labor instead of their doctors utilizing standard and safe D&C (dilation and curettage) or D&E (dilation and evacuation) procedures.

Women’s lives, fertility, and health at risk

Three Wisconsin OB-GYNs interviewed by UpNorthNews agreed that the bill, passed late in 2025 and opposed by all Democratic senators, is a threat to the health, fertility, and lives of the state’s women.

Democratic Sen. Kelda Roys calls it “one of the cruelest I’ve ever seen. It’s just a continuation of the effort to really police women’s behavior and police women’s bodies.”

“It is counseling women to have a more dangerous and invasive procedure, like a C-section or inducing labor, rather than a simple and safe abortion,” she told UpNorthNews.

A similar bill, AB546, has been introduced into the State Assembly by Republican members, where they hold the majority.

Since a state circuit court judge ruled in 2023 that an 1849 law did not restrict abortion, Wisconsin Republicans have repeatedly pushed and passed similar legislation that would force doctors to perform C-sections and inductions to end pregnancies.

This latest bill is their fiercest attempt yet, but they included much of the same language in 2023 with the “Embrace Them Both” bill, or SB343 The legislation passed after Republicans learned that abortions could once again take place in Wisconsin.

Dr. Lyerly is convinced that Senate Republicans only see women as vessels for fetuses. In addition to their repeated efforts to promote dangerous C-sections and painful inductions, she says Republicans also redefine the meaning of the word “abortion” in SB553.

Republicans redefine abortion: “It’s Orwellian”

This effort to redefine the word “abortion” is “Orwellian,” Roys told the Wisconsin Independent. She says the anti-abortion movement has been trying to manipulate vocabulary for years to argue that abortion is never necessary to save a pregnant person’s life.

SB553 asserts that a termination isn’t actually an abortion if a physician performs the procedure to prevent the “death of a pregnant woman” and it isn’t “designed or intended to kill the unborn child.”

In other words, in this deliberate confusion of language, if an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life, Senate Republicans insist the termination is not an actual abortion.

All three OB-GYNs interviewed insist that attempts to redefine the word “abortion” only serve to confuse physicians.

They also agree that bills like SB553 and AB546 leave pregnant Wisconsinites in danger of losing their health, their future fertility, and their lives.

“This legislation talks about preventing the death of a pregnant person, but it does not talk about preserving the health of my patients. That’s my job,” stresses Dr. Lyerly.

“It’s not to use my patients as an incubator until they can finally deliver a baby and then we can let them die peacefully. My job is to optimize their health.”

Wisconsin OB-GYN Dr. Anna Igler is just as fearful for Wisconsin’s women as Dr. Lyerly.

“I would never do a C-section on a woman when a less invasive procedure like a D&C or D&E could be used when a pregnancy of 17, 18, 19, or 22 weeks needs to be medically ended,” she said.

“A C-section would be much more complicated with much higher risk of bleeding. The uterus at that stage of pregnancy is much thicker, and the incision would have to be much bigger proportionally to the size of the uterus at that time.”

“If the patient has a future pregnancy, you would increase her risk of having the scar open up—it’s called a uterine rupture. It would cause hemorrhaging, and she could potentially lose her uterus.”

Politicians don’t understand medical care

Republican lawmakers “write these laws without having any understanding of how medical care is provided and how it works,” asserts Dr. Caroline Zeal, an OB-GYN and complex family planning specialist in Madison.

“All that they’re doing is interfering with providing reasonable, effective, evidence-based care.”

Dr. Zeal also calls SB553 a “clear political tactic to redefine ‘personhood’ as beginning at the moment of fertilization, instead of at the birth of a live baby.”

That’s because the bill also defines all fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses as “unborn children” who are “human beings” from the “time of fertilization.”

“They snuck a personhood law in there,” agrees Dr. Igler.

Passing fetal personhood laws has become a common tactic for Republicans under the sway of anti-abortion groups. The concept of legal personhood for every fertilized egg has been adopted by the Republican National Committee as part of its platform multiple times, including in 2024.

Personhood for “unborn children” confers legal rights on every fertilized egg equal to the rights of its mother.

Anti-abortion groups and Republicans see this as another way to outlaw all abortion.

“If you elevate a fetus to the status of a person and grant it citizenship rights equal to that of a pregnant person, then now you have a clash of rights,” explains Rebecca Kluchin, a history professor at California State University who is writing a book about efforts to establish fetal personhood in the US, titled Birth Rights: A History of Personhood and Reproductive Justice.

However, the Supreme Court rejected the concept of legal personhood for embryos and fertilized eggs when it established the nationwide right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.

They’re declaring fertilized eggs to be “unborn children”

Dr. Lyerly points out how untenable it would be in real life to call a fertilized egg a human being with rights equal to its pregnant mother.

“Their very concept, their very definition is flawed. When is an egg actually fertilized? I can tell you if it’s an IVF pregnancy, but I can’t tell you if it’s a natural pregnancy,” says Dr. Lyerly.

“What about all of those fertilized eggs that never implant? They just pass out of somebody’s body and are never detected. Fertilized eggs that become a very early miscarriage and pass out of a woman when she just has a heavy period.”

Agrees Dr. Igler: “Not every fertilized egg can make a healthy baby. That’s just biology. If this bill is signed into law, it’s going to be a big legal problem for IVF and for all the IVF clinics.”

That’s exactly what happened in Alabama in 2024 when IVF clinics were forced to stop their services after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics had legal personhood rights.

The Alabama Legislature was forced to pass a law granting civil and criminal immunity to IVF clinics so they could continue their work after desperate parents-to-be lobbied their representatives and the governor.

But would a Wisconsin Republican-controlled Legislature, like the one the state has now, be prepared to do the same thing for IVF clinics after passing SB553?

Many anti-abortion groups vehemently oppose IVF procedures because they create embryos that are never implanted inside a woman’s womb.

IVF could be endangered in Wisconsin

Dr. Igler, who conceived two of her three children through IVF, explains how SB553 would have prevented her from giving birth to two healthy babies.

“I made four embryos, but genetic testing showed that only one was genetically normal. That little embryo is now my 3½-year-old. But if this law gets signed, what would we do with the three unhealthy embryos (which would have legal personhood)?” she asks.

“They would have resulted in miscarriages (if implanted in her uterus), or would they have to be stored frozen indefinitely? This bill was not thought out.”

Most of all, the OB-GYNs fear that Republican lawmakers are placing their anti-abortion zealotry ahead of the health of Wisconsin’s women.

They are “inserting themselves in between the patient and the physician, and they shouldn’t be doing that. It’s hypocritical. I thought Republicans were for less government regulation,” Dr. Igler points out.

“But when it comes to women and their reproductive choices, they seem to want to micromanage women’s reproductive parts and choices.”

“A lot of situations with women’s pregnancies that require medical abortions to save women’s lives and fertility—like unviable ectopic and molar pregnancies, which can also become cancerous—are highly individualized,” points out Dr. Igler.

“You can’t memorialize these in law. The only way you as a patient can manage these situations is in the exam room, with someone you trust, who understands the data and can explain it to you and what this means for you in your specific situation, in the context of your life,” says Dr. Lyerly.

“You should be able to trust that legislators have your best interest in mind and that they actually care about your health.”

“Unfortunately,” she says, “with SB553, that isn’t the case.”

Gov. Tony Evers’ office has said that he will veto the bill if it gets to his desk.

However, he is not standing for re-election in November. The two leading Republican candidates for governor, Tom Tiffany and Josh Schoemann, have both taken strong anti-abortion positions and are highly unlikely to veto SB553 or a similar bill.

Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO and editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and USWeekly.

Reprinted with permission from American Journal News. This article first appeared in Up North News.