Wisconsin has been at the center of the abortion rights debate for years: from the resurrection of an 1849 state abortion ban after Dobbs, to the state Supreme Court striking it down, to Chris Taylor demolishing her opponent to nab a state Supreme Court seat on an explicitly pro-abortion-rights platform. Abortion attitudes matter to voters in the Badger State.

But a new question is consuming the legal system right now, and it goes well beyond Wisconsin’s borders: Should Americans be able to get the most commonly used abortion medication, mifepristone, through the mail? The case has bounced all over the courts and we are still waiting for a final answer.

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to mifepristone access on the grounds that the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate they had the legal standing to sue. So in October 2025, Louisiana’s attorney general filed a new lawsuit, targeting Food and Drug Administration rules that allow mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and sent to patients through the mail. The Fifth Circuit moved to roll back those rules affecting all 50 states. Drug manufacturers raced to the Supreme Court for emergency relief, which it granted.

Now, as the case, Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana, is winding its way back through the Fifth Circuit and almost certainly then back to the Supreme Court, there’s a more straightforward question worth thinking about: what does the American public want?

This spring, the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at UW-Madison, which I direct, surveyed 2,000 American adults, asking whether they support or oppose allowing people to purchase abortion pills through the mail. The results reveal a citizenry with less opposition to the idea than there is in the nation’s courts.

Half of all Americans support mail access to mifepristone. Only 30% oppose it. The rest are in the middle.

Not surprisingly, there are partisan differences. Republicans oppose mail access 57% to 20%, and Democrats support it 74% to 12%.

Men and women are on the same page, favoring access to mifepristone by mail by essentially equal margins.

The starkest divide in the data is not partisanship itself but fidelity to President Donald Trump. Strong Trump supporters oppose mail access 64% to 16%. Americans who oppose Trump support it 70% to 15%.

Independents support mail access to mifepristone by a margin of 52% to 25%, looking much more like Democrats than Republicans on an issue that has dominated many local and statewide elections since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

This matters with the 2026 midterms approaching.

Democrats and abortion rights advocates have been figuring out how to translate that sentiment into votes, and the recent track record is encouraging for them. In Wisconsin this past April, Taylor, the liberal candidate for state Supreme Court, won her seat by 20 points after making abortion rights central to her campaign, besting the 2025 result, where liberal candidate Susan Crawford beat former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel by 10 points for a seat on Wisconsin’s high court. Democrats also successfully defended three Pennsylvania Supreme Court seats in recent retention elections by going all-in on abortion. The pattern is consistent: When abortion is the issue, Democratic-aligned candidates outperform expectations.

Republicans in competitive districts and states face a genuine strategic problem here. The base requires a position on abortion restrictions that is substantially to the right of the median voter — including, again, the median Independent voter. And the 2026 elections occur in an environment that already favors Democrats for structural and contemporary reasons.

The stakes are high, but they are about more than elections and they aren’t only about abortion. UW-Madison researchers at the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity have found that if mifepristone access is restricted, many first-trimester miscarriages each year would be managed without the best available medical care. This could harm hundreds of thousands of Americans annually, with serious risks including life-threatening infection. In Wisconsin, mifepristone is available for in-person abortion care, but state law prohibits telehealth for medication abortion. Nevertheless, in 2025, CORE reported that about 34% of Wisconsin abortions came from orders of medication abortion pills from shield law providers, further complicating the issue. The national fight over mail access, in other words, could hit Wisconsin patients especially hard.

Mifepristone is how one in four Americans already access legal abortion — and, as the CORE researchers remind us, it’s how miscarriage patients get safe care too.

The courts may treat the question of mail access as unsettled. Most of the public has made up its mind. 

Michael W. Wagner is the William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal and a professor at the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is a former member of the Board of Directors for Isthmus.