Iowa’s state legislature held a special session on Tuesday ahead of voting on a bill the same day that would ban most abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know they are pregnant. The state is the latest in the country to vote on legislation restricting reproductive rights after the overturning of Roe v Wade last year, which ended the nationwide constitutional right to abortion.
Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, called for the special session last week, vowing to “continue to fight against the inhumanity of abortion” and calling the “pro-life” movement against reproductive rights “the most important human rights cause of our time”. Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature will debate house study bill 255, which was released on Friday and seeks to prohibit abortions at the first sign of cardiac activity except in certain cases such as rape or incest.
Iowa’s house, senate and governor’s office are all Republican-controlled, and the bill faces few hurdles to being passed.
Republicans in state legislatures nationwide have rolled back reproductive rights after the end of Roe, and have banned or severely limited abortions in more than a dozen states. A number of those states, such as Texas, Alabama and Mississippi, passed full abortion bans with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. The bans, which powerful Christian conservative groups have supported, are in conflict with the views of the majority of Americans who numerous polls show are generally supportive of abortion access. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa survey from last year showed that about 61% of Iowans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Heated protests and a public hearing
Before Iowa’s legislature debated the bill, lawmakers held a public hearing on Tuesday that gave advocates and opponents of the legislation a chance to deliver brief statements. Each side was given equal time, alternating between speakers for over two hours.
Multiple medical professionals spoke in opposition to the bill, warning that passing it would endanger patients and prevent physicians from issuing care. Other reproductive rights advocates spoke on how the bill would take away people’s autonomy and oppose the will of the majority of Iowans.
“What a privileged life you lead if you can only see pregnancy as a blessing,” said Amy Bingaman, an obstetrician and gynecologist. “You would be forcing a woman to a lifelong obligation which affects her education, career, family and community.”
“Do you know the intricacies and nuances and the pain and the joy and fear and everything that comes with having a uterus and looking for basic healthcare? Do you?” Naya Thomas, a birth doula and employee at Planned Parenthood, told lawmakers.
A number of anti-abortion speakers backing the legislation came from Christian advocacy groups and framed their position as a human rights issue.
“We talk about women’s rights, but we don’t want to give those rights to girls in the womb,” said Maggie DeWitte, the executive director of Pulse Life Advocates, an anti-abortion group which also states on its website that “contraception kills babies”.
A pastor from Des Moines who backed the legislation described how he stood praying outside a Planned Parenthood location once a week for seven years, and warned that “everyone in this room is going to stand before a holy god and give an account, and woe to the one who says, ‘I arbitrarily chose death.’” Another speaker in support of the bill, who identified himself as a medical student and president of his university’s Christian medical association, compared denying rights to fetuses with slavery and the Holocaust.
As the public hearing took place inside the chambers, a crowd of protesters from both sides waved signs and shouted slogans in the capitol rotunda. The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who had been campaigning in Iowa, also arrived at the capitol on Tuesday and was met with abortion rights demonstrators chanting “fascist” at him.
Demonstrators booed and shouted at Republican lawmakers after members of a subcommittee voted to advance the bill to a general house vote.
“You’re killing women!” one protester yelled, as state troopers escorted the demonstrators away from the chambers.
A split court decision forces vote
Iowa’s bill is similar to a 2018 state law, then the most restrictive in the nation, that banned abortions at about six weeks. The Iowa supreme court later deemed that law unconstitutional in 2019 and blocked it from coming into effect. The court decided last year, however, that abortion is not a constitutionally protected right in Iowa – a ruling that opened the door for lawmakers to restrict reproductive rights in the state.
The special session on Tuesday is taking place after Reynolds failed in her attempt to have the Iowa supreme court remove the injunction against her 2018 six-week abortion ban and allow it to be enforced. The Iowa supreme court justice Thomas Waterman called the state’s attempt to enact the 2018 six-week abortion ban “an unprecedented effort to judicially revive a statute that was declared unconstitutional”, and in his opinion last month referenced a previous ruling that made it illegal for police to search a suspect’s garbage without a warrant.
“It would be ironic and troubling for our court to become the first state supreme court in the nation to hold that trash set out in a garbage can for collection is entitled to more constitutional protection than a woman’s interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body,” Waterman wrote.
The court was split 3-3 in its decision last month on reinstating the 2018 bill, resulting in a deadlock that meant a lower court’s ruling blocking the ban remained in place.
