From WisPolitics.com/WisBusiness.com …
— Sen. Kelda Roys said medical providers now have to wrestle with providing care for women or obeying the law because of “restrictive” abortion laws in the state.
“Abortion bans do not stop abortion,” the Madison Dem said yesterday. “But what they do is they kill women, and they make all of us vulnerable to not receiving the medical care that we need.”
Roys was speaking at an event organized by Free and Just, a national organization that promotes reproductive freedom, as part of a panel on abortion access in Madison.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes a provision that would block Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood.
Attorney General Josh Kaul joined a multi-state lawsuit last month suing the Trump administration over these cuts. This is one of several lawsuits nationwide, and some have resulted in injunctions blocking the provision.
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled this summer that the state’s 1849 abortion ban was no longer in place, effectively establishing that abortion is legal in Wisconsin for up to 20 weeks.
Abby Cutler is an OB-GYN for UW Health and UW–Madison assistant professor and researcher. She said on the panel that although there are reasons to celebrate the recent state Supreme Court decision, the Legislature could pass another ban. Wisconsin’s laws already restrict access, she noted.
“That brings us back to a pretty low bar when it comes to access for all people who need it and are safe,” Cutler said. “We have just a slew of abortion restrictions on the books that predated Dobbs that make it really, really difficult to access care if you’re a patient and to provide care if you’re a provider.”
Cutler also said some of the services Trump is attempting to defund aren’t abortion services. She said Planned Parenthood provides mental health care, family planning and other medical care. Cutler added these services are on the “chopping block” because the administration is targeting all abortion care.
Cutler said one of the state’s “most insidious” bans is the lack of insurance coverage for abortion care, and it would be “life-changing” for those seeking abortions if it were provided.
Roys said at the event she had introduced a bill this session that would protect the right to abortion for all patients if deemed necessary and acceptable by a medical provider, not lawmakers. SB 271 would also require state and local government insurance plans to cover abortions.
Several Dems have signed onto the bill, but no Republicans have joined, and the bill has not received a committee hearing.
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
— Research co-authored by a UW-Madison professor finds life expectancy improvement in high-income countries has “slowed significantly.”
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved Héctor Pifarré i Arolas, an assistant professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs.
After assessing life expectancy for 23 high-income countries with low mortality rates and applying various forecasting models, the researchers found the “unprecedented increase” in life expectancy seen early in the 20th century is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
“In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life, life expectancy would still not match the rapid increases seen in the early 20th century even if adult survival improved twice as fast as we predict,” Pifarré i Arolas said in the university’s release.
Life expectancy among the study countries rose by about five and half months with each generation between 1900 and 1938, bringing the average life expectancy for someone born in those countries from 62 years to 80 years over that period.
But for those born between 1939 and 2000, that fell to between two and a half months and three and a half months per generation, based on the mortality forecasting models.
The earlier increases in life expectancy were linked to medical and quality of life improvements at the start of the 20th century, the university notes. Study co-author José Andrade of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research says “remarkable improvements in survival at very young ages” in particular drove those improvements.
But now that infant and child mortality are much lower, forecasted longevity improvements among older people won’t be enough to keep up the pace of life expectancy improvements.
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone,” Andrade said.
See the release below.
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