DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a six-week abortion ban Friday, setting off a new legal battle over the future of reproductive rights in the key presidential state and escalating further. plus the presence of a divisive issue in the campaign.
Surrounded by a cadre of Republican state lawmakers and anti-abortion leaders, Reynolds inked the move during a special on-stage presentation at the Family Leadership Summit, a high-profile policy gathering hosted by an evangelical Christian group.
“All life is precious and deserves the protection of our laws,” Reynolds said during the signing ceremony, adding that the law represents “a firm commitment to the smallest and most vulnerable among us.”
The law went into effect the moment Reynolds signed the bill, but it could be short-lived.
Across town, in Polk County District Court, the state judge hearing a challenge filed by a group of reproductive rights groups seeking a temporary injunction said it would take until next week coming to make a decision.
“This request requires my strong and lengthy attention,” Polk County District Court Judge Joseph Seidlin said during the hearing. A verdict is possible as early as Monday.
If the request for an emergency injunction is accepted, the six-week ban would be blocked while the legal challenge plays out in the court system.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and the Emma Goldman Clinic, a women’s health care center in Iowa City, filed the legal challenge in state court Wednesday afternoon. arguing that the new ban violates the Iowa state constitution. Officials with the groups said they expect the case to reach the state Supreme Court.
Despite the legal challenge, Reynolds, as well as a parade of Republican presidential candidates, celebrated the signing and predicted the new law would prevail.
“Our work is not done,” Reynolds said. “As we gather here today at this very moment, the abortion industry is in court trying to stop this law from going into effect and stop, once again, the will of the people.”
The measure includes exceptions for the life of the mother, miscarriages and fetal abnormalities deemed by a doctor to be “incompatible with life.”
The bill also includes exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. For these exceptions to apply, the violation must have been reported to law enforcement or a “public or private health agency” – which includes a family doctor – within 45 days, and Incest must have been reported to any of these officials or entities within the deadline. 140 days
Reproductive rights advocates have said a six-week ban is tantamount to a total ban because many women don’t even know they’re pregnant that early.
Reproductive rights groups had said that if the law went into effect immediately, it would send abortion clinics and patients into the state. Planned Parenthood officials said clinics across the state remained open Thursday until 10 p.m. offering care in anticipation of Friday’s signing.
Previously, abortion care was legal in Iowa up to the 20th week of pregnancy.
Reynold’s choice of venue for his signing further solidifies the role the divisive issue of abortion rights will play in presidential politics, both in the key early voting state and across the United States.
Friday’s summit, moderated by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, was attended by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, many of whom, at various points during the conference, praised Reynolds and his bill.
“Governor Kim Reynolds knocked it out of the park,” Haley said after the signing.
“We’re here on a historic day in Iowa,” Pence said during a morning session before the signing. He praised Reynolds for his plan to sign “historic protections for the unborn into law.”
Former President Donald Trump, who has been more reluctant to adopt strict abortion bans on the campaign trail than some of his rivals, skipped the event.
Although support for stronger abortion restrictions remains popular among conservative evangelical Christians, a key voting bloc in Iowa’s Republican caucuses. in the stateas well as nationally, it finds that the majority of voters support abortion rights.
And while lining up with a six-week ban could help a candidate in Iowa, it plays out differently in New Hampshire, the next contest in the 2024 primary.
The state’s libertarian-leaning Republican electorate tends to be more open about the issue; Gov. Chris Sununu, for example, is among a small list of Republican governors who support abortion rights.
Those rocky roads underscore the struggles Republicans, more broadly, have faced in talking to voters about abortion rights in the year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. Part of the Democrats’ success in the midterms comes from their ability to successfully use the abortion issue to go after Republicans.
Reynolds called a special legislative session dedicated solely to enacting “pro-life legislation” after the state Supreme Court issued a split decision this month that allowed the six-week abortion ban that lawmakers had enacted in 2018 to remain permanently blocked.
Iowa Republicans, who control the Legislature, needed just 15 hours on Tuesday to approve the new six-week ban.
While the new law already faces the same kind of legal challenges as the 2018 law, the outcome could be different this time with a full state Supreme Court issuing a decision.
That of the court split opinion Last month, that 2018 law was a narrow decision based largely on procedural grounds, meaning it remains possible, if not likely, that a full seven-member court could find a legal consensus on a new prohibition One of the court’s seven judges, Dana Oxley, a Reynolds appointee, recused herself because her former law firm represented an abortion clinic that was a plaintiff in the original case.
