Iowa Supreme Court upholds six-week abortion ban, rejects constitutionality of access to reproductive care
The highest court in Iowa ruled in favor of the state’s six-week abortion ban on Friday, effectively reducing access to care before many people know they are pregnant.
The law includes exceptions related to the life of a pregnant woman and fetal abnormalities that can lead to infant death — provisions that medical experts say are rarely implemented in practice.
Iowa’s ban also allows abortion in cases of rape or incest, but only if reported within 45 or 140 days. To be granted a rape or incest exception, according to rules set forth by the Iowa Board of Medicine before the court ruled, a doctor must gather information about how the pregnancy progressed and obtain a certification signed to confirm the information is correct.
This decision “will have a devastating impact on the already poor health conditions in Iowa and force people into pregnancy,” Francine Thompsonsaid Emma Goldman, CEO of the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City. President and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States 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 services they need, including abortion, regardless of their ZIP code,” she said.
According to the ACLU of Iowa, until the new ban is officially implemented in about three weeks, Iowans can still have abortions in the state past the 20th week of pregnancy.
“There is no right more sacred than life, and nothing deserves our stronger protection than the innocent unborn,” Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who won re-election in 2022 by about 19 percentage points, said. Reynolds shares that she is “deeply committed to helping women plan for motherhood, and promoting fatherhood and its importance in raising children.”
In a statement, President 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.”
Abortion access has changed over the 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 the state courts quickly overturned the ban. That same month, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the three-day waiting period violated the state constitution.
Fast forward to 2022, when the US Supreme Court ruling Dobbs set a new precedent for state lawmakers to use. Just four days later Fish eggs overturned, Governor Reynolds announced she would bring the abortion issue back to state court using the Dobbs decision, reinstating the six-week ban. The two years since have been filled with new iterations of the now-implemented law, court challenges and confusion for those seeking reproductive care in Iowa.
Iowa now joins 14 states that ban abortion in most cases and three others—Florida, Georgia and South Carolina—with a gestation limit of six weeks. Nationally, 63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. And a Des Moines Register/The 2023 Mediacom Iowa poll found that 61 percent of Iowa adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Friday’s ruling addressed whether the state’s six-week ban imposes an “undue burden” on people seeking abortion care, a standard that Planned Parenthood has argued the abortion ban must meet under the state constitution. The test stems 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 the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus is capable of viability.”
