DES MOINES, Iowa – The Iowa Supreme Court is expected to weigh in Friday on the state’s temporary lockdown abortion lawwhich prohibits abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy and before many women know they are pregnant.
With the law on hold, abortion It is legal in Iowa up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. On Friday, the justices could uphold or reject a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked enforcement of the law, with or without comment on whether the law itself is constitutional. Both supporters of the law and abortion providers who opposed it were preparing for the various possibilities.
The high court’s long-awaited ruling will be the latest in a years-long legal battle over the state’s abortion restrictions, which intensified when the Iowa Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decisions establishing a right constitutional right to abortion.
Most Republican-led states across the country have limited abortion access since 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overruled. At the moment, 14 states they have almost total bans at all stages of pregnancy and three prohibit abortions at around six weeks.
The Iowa law passed with all-Republican support in one day special session last July. 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 took effect for a few days before a district court judge pauseda decision that Republican Governor Kim Reynolds appealed.
Iowa’s high court has not yet decided whether previous rulings applying an “undue burden test” to abortion laws should remain in effect. The undue burden test is an intermediate level of analysis that asks whether laws create too significant an obstacle to abortion.
The state argued that the law should be analyzed using a rational basis analysis, the least rigorous approach to adjudicating legal challenges, and the court should simply evaluate whether the government has a legitimate interest in restricting the procedure.
Representing the state during oral arguments in April, attorney Eric Wessan said the bench already indicated what is appropriate in this case when it ruled that there is no “fundamental right” to abortion in the state constitution.
“This court has never before recognized a quasi-fundamental or fundamental right,” he said.
But Peter Im, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood, told the justices that there are fundamental constitutional rights at stake that merit the court’s consideration of whether there is too great a burden for people seeking access to abortion.
“It is emphatically the role and duty of this court to say how the Iowa Constitution protects individual rights, how it protects bodily autonomy, how it protects the rights of Iowans to exercise dominion over their own bodies,” he said.
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