Iowa Supreme Court upholds six-week abortion ban, strikes down constitutionality of access to reproductive care
Highest court in Iowa rule support the state’s six-week abortion ban on Friday, essentially reducing access to care before many even know that they are pregnant.
This law includes exceptions for the life of the pregnant woman and for fetal abnormalities that could lead to the death of the infant—allowance that thing medical professionals say rarely done IN practice.
Iowa’s ban also allows abortions in cases of rape or incest, but only if reported within 45 or 140 days, respectively. To qualify for the rape or incest exception, according to rules set by the Iowa Medical Board before the court’s decision, a doctor must obtain factual information about how the pregnancy occurred and obtain a signed certificate that the information is true.
This decision “will have a devastating impact on the already poor health conditions in Iowa and force people into pregnancy,” Francine Thompsonexecutive director of the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, said Planned Parenthood North Central President and CEO Ruth Richardson said the group has been preparing for this possibility for months. “Everyone deserves access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health care they need, including abortion, regardless of their ZIP code,” she said.
Until the new ban is officially implemented in about three weeks, Iowans can still have abortions in the state up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. according to to the ACLU of Iowa.
“There is no right more sacred than life, and nothing deserves our stronger protection than the innocent unborn,” Republican Gov. Kim ReynoldsWho won re-election by 19 percentage points by 2022, Reynolds said. She said she is “deeply committed to supporting women in planning for parenthood, and promoting fatherhood and its importance in raising children.”
In one declareChairperson Joe Biden said the ban “puts women’s health and lives at risk,” adding, “Vice President Harris and I believe that women in every state must have the right to make deeply personal decisions about their health.”
Access to abortion has changed for several years in Iowa. In 2017, Republican lawmakers in the state passed a 20-week ban with a three-day waiting period (which the courts later halted). In 2018, the legislature passed a six-week ban and state courts quickly issued the ban. That same month, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the three-day waiting period violated the state’s constitution.
Fast forward to 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court decision IN Dobbs provides a new precedent for state lawmakers to use. Just four days later Caviar was overturned, Governor Reynolds announced she would take the abortion issue back to state courts, using Dobbs decided to reinstate the six-week ban. The two years since have been filled with new iterations of the law now being implemented, court challenges and confusion for those seeking reproductive care in Iowa.
Iowa now join 14 states ban abortion in most cases and three others—Florida, GeorgiaAnd South Carolina—with a gestation limit of 6 weeks. Nationally, 63 percent of Americans speak According to Pew, abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And, one Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll from 2023 establish 61 percent of adults in Iowa say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Friday’s ruling addressed the issue of whether the state’s six-week ban would impose an “undue burden” on people seeking abortion services, a standard that Planned Parenthood has argued that abortion bans must meet under the state constitution. That test comes from a 2015 case in which the court ruled, in a series of federal findings, that abortion restrictions are unconstitutional if they impose “a substantial obstacle in a woman’s path to an abortion before the fetus has reached viability.”
