State Supreme Court candidates far apart on abortion

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It’s hard to imagine two people further apart on the issue of abortion than Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar.

Taylor, a state appeals court judge from Madison and the liberal candidate in the race, previously worked as law and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin – a major reproductive health care provider and abortion rights group – where she said she “defended constitutional rights and advocated for health care access for all and for each individual to make their own personal, private health care decisions.”

Taylor has praised last year’s state Supreme Court decision invalidating Wisconsin’s 1849 law that banned abortions in nearly every situation.

Lazar, a state appeals court judge from Waukesha County and the conservative candidate in the race, personally opposes abortion but has said that she would uphold Wisconsin’s current 20-week abortion ban. She has called the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion legal nationwide “very wise” because it sent the issue back to the states.

When asked about the state Supreme Court ruling striking down Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban, Lazar said, “I don’t know that I would have been in the majority on that case.”

The winner of the April 7 election will be elected to a 10-year term on the state’s highest court. Early voting started on March 24.

Liberals currently hold a 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court and will maintain a majority on the court regardless of who wins. A Taylor victory in April would extend the liberal majority to 5-2, while a Lazar win would maintain the current 4-3 split.

Without control of the court in play, this year’s race has seen far less attention – and spending – than the historically expensive 2025 state Supreme Court race.

Here are some takeaways from the candidates’ campaign advertisements, work histories, endorsements and comments that shed light on their positions on abortion.

Both candidates have addressed the issue of abortion in campaign ads.

A Lazar ad targeting Taylor and her work as a Democratic state lawmaker cited a 2017 bill she authored that said “every woman has the fundamental right to choose to obtain a safe and legal abortion.”

Under the measure, which failed to pass the Republican-controlled state Legislature, the state could not prohibit a woman from getting “an abortion at any time during her pregnancy if the termination is necessary, in the professional judgment of a physician, to protect her life or health.”

Lazar’s campaign ad says Taylor supports allowing abortion “up until the point of birth,” as a copy of the bill flashes on the screen.

Taylor’s campaign released two ads criticizing Lazar for calling the repeal of Roe v. Wade “very wise” and slammed her past endorsements by anti-abortion groups.

Taylor was law and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin from 2003 to 2011, until she was elected to the state Assembly in August of that year.

In a 2013 feature in the Madison news outlet Isthmus, Taylor described herself as “the lead advocate at the state level for women’s reproductive health care” during her time with the organization, lobbying for bills that protected reproductive rights at the Capitol.

Asked whether she would recuse herself from cases involving Planned Parenthood if elected to the state’s highest court, Taylor told the Journal Sentinel in May 2025 that she would make such decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Before becoming a judge, Lazar served as an assistant attorney general from 2010 to 2015 under Republican Attorneys General J.B. Van Hollen and Brad Schimel.

During that time, Lazar represented the state in a case filed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin over a law that required physicians performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Liberals have criticized her work on that and other politically charged cases. But Lazar has said she was doing her job, adding that if a Democrat had been in charge of the state Department of Justice, “I would have worked just as damn hard on those cases.”

“Because I don’t like to lose,” she added.

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, the organization’s lobbying arm, has endorsed Taylor.

In a Feb. 23 news release, the group’s president, Tanya Atkinson, said Taylor “understands the real-world consequences of court decisions and has consistently demonstrated the judgment, integrity, and independence Wisconsinites deserve on our highest court.”

Atkinson praised Taylor’s time with Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, including her development of legal and policy strategies to expand access to contraception and family planning. She “helped elect pro-Planned Parenthood leaders statewide,” Atkinson wrote.

Taylor was also endorsed Feb. 4 by Reproductive Freedom for All, the group formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. Reproductive Freedom for All first endorsed a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate in 2023, backing liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz. The group endorsed liberal Justice Susan Crawford in 2025.

Lazar was elected to be a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge in 2015 and was reelected in 2021.

When she ran for a seat on the Waukesha-based District 2 Court of Appeals in 2022, she was backed by conservative groups, including Wisconsin Right to Life and Pro-Life Wisconsin, which only endorses candidates who agree with the group’s support of an abortion ban with no exceptions.

In the state Supreme Court race, Lazar’s endorsements have primarily come from conservative justices, fellow judges and law enforcement officials – as well as the Republican U.S. representatives from Wisconsin.

“This April, Wisconsin has the opportunity to stand up for our freedoms, defend voter ID, and support a fair and impartial judiciary,” the Republican House members said in a March statement announcing their endorsement of Lazar.

When the state Supreme Court invalidated Wisconsin’s abortion ban in July 2025, Taylor said in a news release that the court’s decision “correctly renders [the ban] unenforceable, protecting an individual’s right to make their most personal, private decisions about their bodies and their lives.”

Taylor also criticized the minority opinion on the ruling from conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, whose seat she is now running to fill. She wrote that Bradley “continues to be more concerned with forcing her own right-wing agenda onto the people of our state than protecting our most basic constitutional rights and freedoms.”

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Americans no longer have a constitutional right to abortion, a watershed decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Lazar praised the Dobbs decision during a 2025 interview.

“This is such a complicated area, and I can tell you abortion is not something that I would consider and not something I would do,” Lazar said.

“But I can also tell you that the United States Supreme Court, in the issuance of Dobbs, which everyone threw tantrums about and were very upset about, was actually very wise. Because what it did is it said each individual state can now have the members of that state – so the citizens of Wisconsin – we can now decide what we want to do about abortion,” she said.

Taylor served in the Wisconsin Legislature from 2011 to 2020. For most of her tenure, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker was the state’s top executive and worked with the Republican-led legislature to enact restrictions on abortion.

Taylor was a vocal opponent of such laws and policies.

In 2014 testimony on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a federal bill that would have essentially codified the right to an abortion, Taylor criticized Wisconsin’s  abortion restrictions, including a law that required providers to show an ultrasound and one that placed new restrictions on medication abortion.

“These restrictions do not promote women’s health or safety, and run counter to sound medical practice and opinion,” Taylor said in her testimony. “In fact, by making abortion services more difficult or impossible to access, these restrictions threaten the health, safety and lives of Wisconsin women and women throughout this country.”

In 2015, she blasted her Republican colleagues for fast-tracking a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks, which is still enforced today. Taylor said at the time that the ban’s narrow exception, only to save the life or health of the mother, “says unless a woman is going to imminently die or she’s going to lose a bodily function, you’re out of luck,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

In 2018, she argued that legislation prohibiting government-provided health insurance plans from paying for abortions in most cases would make it harder for public workers who are victims of sexual assault to access abortion care.

During a UW-Whitewater College Republicans event in November, Lazar was asked about the issue of abortion. In her wide-ranging response, she discussed her personal opposition to abortion, but added that it doesn’t matter because she wouldn’t try to legislate from the bench.

Lazar also said Roe v. Wade “didn’t work,” and again praised the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, effectively sending the authority to regulate or ban abortion back to each state.

Noting that current Wisconsin law bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Lazar said she wouldn’t attempt to change the law as a justice – and instead said Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Legislature should compromise and resolve the issue.

“Just make a decision, and make a fair, good decision,” Lazar said. “If they’re going to say heartbeat, I think maybe people can live with that.”

So-called fetal heartbeat laws, which ban abortions after about six weeks from conception, are some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

At an event at Marquette University Law School in February, Lazar was asked about whether she would agree with abortion restrictions stricter than Wisconsin’s 20-week ban.

She again said that her personal view was irrelevant and that “the question of abortion belongs with the people of the state of Wisconsin, and it belongs to them to tell their elected officials – not judges – to tell their elected officials what they want.”

“My view is, if the citizens of my state say they want to move that line from 20 to 18 (weeks) or 20 to 22 (weeks), and they get their elected officials to do it and they do it in the right way, then who am I to say anything other?” Lazar said.