Wisconsin Supreme Court justice attacked for past pro-life writings

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley is under fire for political writings she penned for the Marquette Tribunal as a student in 1992, including columns articulating strong pro-life views.

Governor Scott Walker appointed Bradley to the state’s high court in October to fill a vacancy, and she is currently running for election to a full term. As a student at Marquette University, she described abortion as a “similar slaughter” to past injustices such as slavery and the Nazi Holocaust.

“Rights should extend into the womb” because human life has been conclusively established as beginning at fertilization, Bradley wrote. “A life is being extinguished and no man or woman has the right to take the life of another.”

Critics have alleged that the columns suggest she is too extreme to serve as an impartial jurist. She has apologized for other writings discussing AIDS in harsh terms, but not her abortion writings. Spokeswoman Madison Wiberg responded to questions about them with a statement declaring that Bradley “believes it is the role of the legislature to make the law and the role of a justice to apply it,” and that it would be “improper” to comment on them “due to the potential for the issue to come in front of the state Supreme Court.”

More recently, in 2006 Bradley wrote a column defending the conscience rights of pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for abortifacients.