DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday that strict abortion law is legal, asking a lower court to lift a temporary block on the law and allowing Iowa to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant.
The 4-3 decision is a victory for Republican lawmakers, and Iowa joins more than a dozen other states with restrictive abortion laws after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Until the trial court acts on the Supreme Court’s instruction, abortion remains legal in Iowa up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. It is not yet clear when the trial court will make a decision.
Currently, 14 states have near-total bans on all stages of pregnancy and three ban abortions after about six weeks.
The Iowa Supreme Court majority reiterated Friday that there is no constitutional right to abortion. As the state requested, they asked courts to assess whether the government has a legitimate interest in restricting the procedure, rather than whether the burden is too great on people seeking access to abortion.
Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds immediately released a statement celebrating the decision.
“I am pleased that the Iowa Supreme Court has upheld the will of the people of Iowa,” she said.
Chief Justice Susan Christensen made her dissent clear, writing: “Today, our court’s majority deprives Iowa women of their bodily autonomy by holding that there is no fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy under our state constitution. I cannot uphold that decision.”
Iowa law provides limited circumstances that would allow abortion after six weeks of pregnancy: rape, if reported to law enforcement or a health care provider within 45 days; incest, if reported within 145 days; if the fetus has a fetal abnormality “incompatible with life”; or if the pregnancy is life-threatening. The state medical board recently defined rules on how doctors must comply with the law.
The ruling marks the end of a years-long legal battle over abortion restrictions in Iowa, which intensified in 2022 when the Iowa Supreme Court, and then the United States Supreme Court, both overturned decisions establishing a constitutional right to abortion.
Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that advocates for abortion access, said the ruling would force women seeking abortions to leave Iowa, “engage in self-managed abortion” or carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
“The continuation of this six-week ban in Iowa is a shocking blow to the reproductive autonomy of Iowans,” Gibson said in a statement.
Iowa law passed with sole Republican support in a single day extraordinary session last July. A A legal challenge was filed the following day by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Planned Parenthood North Central States and the Emma Goldman Clinic.
The law had been in force for a few days before a high court the judge put him on holda decision Reynolds has appealed.
At the time, Planned Parenthood North Central States said it stayed open late and made hundreds of phone calls to prepare patients for the uncertainty, rescheduling abortion appointments in other states for those who wanted it. Court documents showed that Iowa clinics had several hundred abortion appointments scheduled over two weeks last July, most of them past the six-week gestation mark.
Since then, Planned Parenthood has ended abortion services in two Iowa cities, including one in Des Moines. The other Des Moines location does not currently have the capacity to serve patients seeking abortions, so the medications and abortion procedure are offered about 37 miles (59 kilometers) north of Ames.
Before Friday, Planned Parenthood providers had again communicated with people seeking upcoming appointments about the potential outcomes of the high court’s ruling, Masie Stilwell, director of public affairs, told The Associated Press early June. This included the possibility that abortion would no longer be legal in their situation and that they would have to work with staff to reschedule it in other states.
Access to abortion is shaping up to be a major issue in the 2024 elections nationwide, although it remains to be seen whether Friday’s decision will reverse the trend in increasingly red Iowa.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Rita Hart said Friday that Republicans “went too far” with the restrictive law, and that “Iowa voters will hold them accountable in November.”
News Source : apnews.com
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