Iowa Now Has One of the Most Restrictive Abortion Laws in the Nation

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday to allow a law that will ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks.

Governor Kim Reynolds signed the uber-restrictive heartbeat abortion ban into law in July 2023, carving out exceptions only in the case of incest or for the health of the mother. The law was challenged the next day by Planned Parenthood, which sought a temporary injunction. A district court quickly granted the injunction, which prevented the law from being enforced, but the decision was appealed by the state.

In a 4–3 ruling, Justice Matthew McDermott delivered the majority opinion, and was joined by Justices Christopher McDonald, David May, and Dana Oxley, who provided the tie-breaking vote after recusing herself from ruling on a previous version of the state’s so-called heartbeat ban.

The court’s majority determined that Planned Parenthood could not justify its request for a temporary injunction, because it was not likely to be successful in proving that the abortion ban was unconstitutional. Therefore, the court decided to dissolve the temporary injunction and remand the case back to district court.

“Our holding today—applying rational basis as the constitutional test—undermines the rationale for the district court’s ruling,” McDermott wrote.

Chief Justice Susan Christenson dissented, writing that the majority opinion “strips Iowa women of their bodily autonomy by holding that there is no fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy under our state constitution.” This ruling, she wrote, “relies heavily on the male-dominated history and traditions of the 1800s, all the while ignoring how far women’s rights have come since the Civil War era. It is a bold assumption to think that the drafters of our state constitution intended for their interpretation to stand still while we move forward as a society.”

Christenson argued that Iowa should have maintained its standard to bar abortion restrictions that placed an “undue burden” on pregnant women.

In Justice Edward Mansfield’s dissenting opinion, he wrote that “the decision not to have children is as fundamental as the decision to have children,” and that the law should protect both rights.

Governor Reynolds applauded the court’s decision in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “There is no right more sacred than life, and nothing more worthy of our strongest defense than the innocent unborn,” she wrote. “As the heartbeat bill finally becomes law, we are deeply committed to supporting women in planning for motherhood, and promoting fatherhood and its importance in parenting.”

This decision is just the latest in the erosion of abortion access after the repeal of Roe v. Wade two years ago, which granted states the right to determine abortion restrictions, a decision that has thrown the rights and well-being of Americans into a desperate and dangerous free fall.