The ACLU of Iowa has filed a lawsuit in Polk County District Court challenging the new ban on almost all abortions in the state, passed by Republican lawmakers during their special session on Tuesday. The ACLU is representing Planned Parenthood of the Heartland (PPH), the Emma Goldman Clinic and PPH Medical Director Dr. Sarah Trexler, who are seeking a preliminary injunction stopping the state from enforcing the ban.
During a news conference Wednesday afternoon, ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen called the bill creating the ban “deeply cruel and callous” and noted it is “substantially identical to the 2018 law that was kept blocked by the Iowa Supreme Court in an order issued just weeks ago.”
The one major difference between the 2018 law and the one contained in HF 732 is timing. The 2018 law was scheduled to take effect on July 1, like most new laws. HF 732 contains a provision making its ban effective as soon as the governor signs the bill.
Immediately following the bill’s passage in the Iowa Senate shortly after 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, Gov. Kim Reynolds said she would sign it on Friday. On Wednesday morning, the governor revealed that signing will take place at 2:15 p.m. on Friday, while she is attending the annual “summit” meeting of the Family Leader, a right-wing Christian group led by Bob Vander Plaats. The Family Leader, which was formed out of groups that opposed same-sex marriage in Iowa, is a strong supporter of Reynolds, and she, in turn, has pushed many of the group’s priorities into state law.
A hearing on the petition for a preliminary injunction is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. on Friday.
There is a precedent for requesting a preliminary injunction against a new law before the bill creating it is signed, Austen explained.
In 2017, Gov. Terry Branstad signed a bill creating a medically unnecessary 72-hour waiting period for an abortion. That law took effect as soon as the governor signed the bill.
“It was passed May 3, 2017,” Austen said. The ACLU of Iowa, representing PPH and the Emma Goldman Clinic, filed a lawsuit the next day.
“We did not get the injunction from the [district court] judge, and had to file an appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, which granted the injunction on May 5,” she said. “The law had gone into effect at that point for a few hours.”
The Iowa Supreme Court struck down the 72-hour waiting hour period as a violation of the rights guaranteed by the Iowa Constitution. Austen explained the current lawsuit is also based on those rights.
“By banning the vast majority of abortions, this bill violates Iowans’ constitutional rights to abortion and substantive due process,” she said. “The ban also violates the Iowa Constitution’s inalienable rights clause … that explicitly guarantees those rights equally to women. We also make an equal protection claim.”
“We’re seeking to block this ban because we know that every day that the law is in effect, Iowans will face life-threatening barriers to getting desperately needed medical care, just as we’ve seen in other states with similar bans.”
@iowastartingline Rep. Timi Brown-Powers (D-Waterloo) tries to add an amendment to the abortion ban to exempt children from being forced to give birth. Iowa Republicans vote it down.
Gov. Reynolds issued a proclamation on July 5 calling the Iowa Legislature into special session for “the sole and single purpose” of passing the near-total ban on abortion. The special session began at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and the ban bill moved rapidly through both chambers of the legislature with only Republican support.
In the brief filed in district court on Wednesday morning, the attorneys noted, “Debate in each chamber lasted less than seven hours, and the entire session lasted less than a day — less than the twenty-four hours that Iowa law requires patients to wait before having an abortion.”
Republican leaders in the legislature dismissed the idea that the bill advanced too quickly and with too little time to thoroughly consider the problems created by it.
“There has not been a rushed process,” Senate President Amy Sinclair, a Republican from Allerton, said during a committee hearing on Tuesday. “In fact, I would suggest that perhaps this has gone on too long, given the nature and the contents of the law.”
According to Sinclair, since the bill was almost identical to the 2018 law, all the necessary discussion about the abortion ban had already occurred five years ago.
The bill requires the Iowa Board of Medicine to create rules to administer the new law and for punishing doctors found to have violated it. But the board has not even had its first meeting on the bill, which will take effect on Friday if the district court does not enjoin its enforcement. The bill isn’t on the board’s agenda for its two-day meeting that starts on Thursday. The board isn’t scheduled to have another in-person meeting until Sept. 14.
It is not clear the board can even take action then. On Jan. 10, Gov. Reynolds signed an executive order creating a moratorium on the creation of new administrative rules.
During the floor debate, Democrat Claire Celsi of Polk County asked supporters of the bill what physicians — who are vulnerable to a Class D felony charge under the new law, carrying a penalty up to five years in prison — should do until the new rules are clarified.
“While you all are at your bill signing party with the governor and a pregnant person needs help at one of the hospitals in my district,” Celsi said, “what rules will the medical professionals in that emergency room or in that hospital go by?”
“My recommendation, I suppose, would be that they follow the plain text of the law,” Sinclair replied.
She added, “Mazel tov, by the way, if they’re having a baby.”
But as numerous Democratic lawmakers pointed out on Tuesday, the bill contains vague language and uses medically inaccurate terms, like “fetal heartbeat.” The bill is based on the idea that the earliest cardiac activity detectable by an ultrasound probe constitutes a fetal heartbeat. That activity isn’t a heartbeat because no heart has been formed at the stage, and at six weeks, the embryo has not yet become a fetus.
Democratic Rep. Megan L. Srinivas, an infectious disease physician, also pointed out that the bill specifies use of a transabdominal ultrasound, which is not the standard of care for pregnant patients and can provide imprecise and inaccurate results.
Republicans were repeatedly challenged by Democrats over such inaccuracies on Tuesday, but dismissed such concerns as meaningless.
It got testy after the vote https://t.co/2nXL8EtIts pic.twitter.com/fAIdCydiBW
— Ty Rushing (@Rushthewriter) July 12, 2023
While both pro-choice and anti-abortion demonstrators in the State Capitol Building on Tuesday were moved to emotion over the significance of the bill, many Republicans were glib about its implications. Rep. Brad Sherman, a pastor who voted for the bill, said if Iowans are so concerned about the loss of reproductive rights, then they shouldn’t have sex.
“It’s that simple. I will stand for everyone’s right to practice abstinence.”
