DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa Supreme Court said Friday the state’s strict abortion law is legal, telling a lower court to dissolve a temporary block on the law and allowing Iowa to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant.
The 4-3 ruling is a win for Republican lawmakers, and Iowa joins more than a dozen other states with restrictive abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The instructions to the lower court will be formally sent in 21 days and, for now, abortion remains legal in Iowa up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. It is unclear how long the district court would take to act after that point.
Currently, 14 states have near-total bans at all stages of pregnancy and three ban abortions at about six weeks.
The Iowa Supreme Court’s majority reiterated on Friday that there is no constitutional right to abortion. As the state requested, they instructed courts to assess whether the government has a legitimate interest in restricting the procedure, rather than whether there is too heavy a burden for people seeking abortion access.
In writing the majority’s opinion, Justice Matthew McDermott wrote that a right to an abortion is “not rooted at all in our state’s history and tradition.” In fact, the majority determined it was the opposite.
“The state’s interest in protecting the unborn can be traced to Iowa’s earliest days,” he wrote.
But Chief Justice Susan Christensen emphatically delivered a dissent, writing that the majority opinion “strips Iowa women of their bodily autonomy.”
Christensen countered McDermott, saying the majority’s “rigid approach relies heavily on the male-dominated history and traditions of the 1800s” and said the Iowa Constitution was not written to reflect the full and equal rights of women.
The ruling previews the ending of a yearslong legal battle over abortion restrictions in Iowa that escalated in 2022 when the Iowa Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court both overturned decisions establishing a constitutional right to abortion.
In the Iowa State Capitol rotunda, Maggie DeWitte, executive director of Pulse Life Advocates, said she’s been working for 25 years to reach this moment.
“Today is celebration for life for moms, for babies and for the entire state,” she said. “To think now that we will finally have protection for children is really hard to put into words.”
Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds immediately released a celebratory statement Friday morning.
“I’m glad that the Iowa Supreme Court has upheld the will of the people of Iowa,” she said.
The Iowa law passed with exclusively Republican support in an one-day special session last July. A legal challenge was filed the next day by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Planned Parenthood North Central States and the Emma Goldman Clinic.
