People protest on June 24, 2022, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after the release of the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe v Wade case and erased a federal right to an abortion. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Two years ago Megan Kling and her husband were eagerly looking forward to the birth of their third child. Then at 20 weeks they got devastating news from their doctor.

The infant, upon being born, would have no chance of surviving. He lacked critical internal organs and his brain and heart were both abnormal.

“Our baby would die, either in utero or within hours after birth,” Kling told reporters Monday morning. “We were in a situation with no good outcome.”

To carry him for another four months, knowing that he would not live, “seemed inhumane,” Kling said.

The diagnosis was confirmed at 22 weeks — and by then, Kling said, her doctors were unable to help her because of an 1849 Wisconsin law that at the time was still being interpreted as a near-blanket ban on abortion.

Kling and her husband, residents of western Wisconsin, traveled to neighboring Minnesota. There, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester confirmed that, if born, their baby would not be viable. At her request, the medical team induced labor at 23 weeks. Kling gave birth and the couple’s son died in their arms an hour later.

Kling told her story Monday at a news conference held by advocates to draw attention to next week’s third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling ending a national right to abortion.

Dr. Nike Mourikes of the Committee to Protect Health Care said from the moment the ruling was issued, “I realized how this cruel decision would cause harm to so many lives and undermine the ability of physicians and other health care providers to care for their patients.”

Abortion was a legal right throughout her medical training and practice until the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mourikes said. 

The Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first 20 weeks while placing some limits on the procedure later in pregnancy. Although Mourikes had heard “the horror stories” of what women had experienced before that decision, she said, “I never imagined that we would ever, ever go back to those days again.”  

As a physician, she has cared for many women who sought abortion to end a pregnancy. “Each woman had her own unique history, her own unique reasons and circumstances that led her to make this complex decision,” Mourikes said. “But that choice was her choice, not the government’s, not a politician’s. It was her body and it was her right.”

The 2022 ruling effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 1849 law, which at the time was widely seen as a near-blanket abortion ban.

A September 2023 Dane County Circuit Court ruling reversed that assumption, with the judge holding that the law applied to feticide, but not to elective abortions. A decision on that ruling is now pending in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, the law “casts a shadow over our state,” Morikes said. Republican lawmakers have been unwilling to repeal the law, and even when Roe v Wade was still in effect, enacted laws “that force doctors to practice medicine not for the good of their patients, but to satisfy anti-abortion politicians.”

Those include a requirement for “an invasive, sometimes painful and medically unnecessary ultrasound” before an abortion, she said, as well as “a medically unnecessary 24-hour waiting period” that requires women to visit a health provider two days in a row before having an abortion.

Sydney Andersen, a government relations specialist for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, said Planned Parenthood has succeeded in returning abortion services to Wisconsin since the Dane County ruling.

But the organization faces new challenges, she said. Those include the budget reconciliation bill  that passed the U.S. House last month and is now in the Senate. A provision in the bill prevents Planned Parenthood from accepting Medicaid coverage for low-income patients.

Planned Parenthood at risk of closing hundreds of clinics, drastically limiting abortion access

If the U.S. Senate enacts the provision and it becomes law, “more than 1 million patients across the United States could lose their access to birth control, wellness exams, vaccines, STI [sexually transmitted infection] testing, and cancer screenings, including over 50,000 patients in Wisconsin alone,” Andersen said. Black women, other people of color, rural residents and other low-income families would experience “the most significant impact,” she said.

Kling, who is 34 and described herself as a working mother, said she was telling the story of her third pregnancy to make the point that “abortion restrictions can impact anyone who can become pregnant.”

In an interview, Kling told the Wisconsin Examiner that she had not been politically engaged before the experience.

“I was always pro-choice, but after going through this experience I wanted to utilize my story to help people understand that this can impact anyone,” she said.

Despite the current circuit court ruling, the current state of Wisconsin law is such that hospitals “will always create policy that is more restrictive than what the law allows,” Kling said. “There’s a lot of gray area in our law right now with the politics.”

In the news conference, Kling described the emotions that washed over the couple in the hour that she and her husband held their dying infant.

“Our son only knew love,” she said. “But as parents, those were the most helpless and traumatic moments that we have ever had to endure.”

Kling said she tried to contact her Republican state lawmakers in hopes of raising their awareness about the effect of the current state of abortion restrictions. Her state representative has not responded to her calls or email messages, and her state senator’s aide said he was “too busy to schedule a 10-minute meeting to hear my story,” she said.

“Are they unwilling to understand what real women are going through or do they simply not care?” Kling said. “Is this the reality you want the women of Wisconsin to face? Forcing us to flee our state for care?”