A new Iowa Poll shows an overwhelming majority of Iowans opposed the state’s new near-total abortion ban. Support for the right to an abortion has also increased since Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the ban into law in July 2023, according to the poll published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they opposed the new law that bans almost all abortions in Iowa after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant.
A supermajority of women — 69 percent — disapprove of the ban.
Seltzer & Co. conducted its survey of 811 Iowans from Sept. 8-11 for the poll, which the firm said has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
“The poll found widespread disapproval of the new law among many groups of Iowans, including 91% of Democrats, 88% of suburban women, 78% of those who identify with no religious group and 71% of all suburban adults,” the Register said, summarizing the findings.
“Among the half-dozen demographic groups likely to favor the six-week ban are Republicans (67%), evangelicals (58%), fathers of children younger than 18 (54%) and residents of the 4th Congressional District, married men and white men with college degrees (each at 50%).”
Selzer and Co. also found that support for abortion in most or all cases has risen to 64 percent, from 61 percent in its March 2023, the last time the Iowa Poll measured sentiments about abortion in the state. The 64 percent is the highest rate of approval for abortion ever recorded by the Iowa Poll.
“It’s clear that Iowans want to live in a state where we have the freedom to make our own healthcare decisions and where politicians stay out of our doctor’s offices,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said during a Monday morning online news conference about the poll results.
“Republicans, you probably will notice, are not campaigning on their support for the abortion ban that they all voted for,” Iowa Senate Minority Leader Pam Jochum, a Democrat from Dubuque, pointed out. “You aren’t going to see it in their political ads because they know it’s not what Iowans want.”
Asked about disconnect between polls in which Iowans have consistently expressed support for abortion rights and the voting patterns over the last several elections that have give Republicans a majority in the Iowa House and a supermajority in the Iowa Senate, Jochum said this year was different because the ban has gone into effect.
“Now, it’s real,” Jochum replied. “In the past, it was not. There were court rulings or whatever that were blocking implementation. Now, it’s real and people are really waking up and realizing that their health is at risk. And now we’re hearing people say enough is enough, this Republican extremism has got to end.”
Iowa’s new abortion ban was passed with only Republican votes during a one-day special session of the Iowa Legislature called by Gov. Reynolds to enact an abortion ban after the Republican-appointed majority U.S. Supreme Court eliminated all federal protection for abortion rights. Reynolds promised to severely restrict abortion in Iowa after that Supreme Court ruling, but chose to initially pursue a longshot legal strategy to review a six-week ban that had already been struck down by the Iowa Supreme Court. The strategy wasn’t successful in its stated goal, but it did allow Republican legislatures to avoid voting on an abortion ban, and allowed the governor to avoid answering questions about a ban, prior to the 2022 election.
The six-week abortion ban was blocked by a temporary injunction issued by a Polk County District Court just days after Reynolds signed it into law. In late June, a sharply divided Iowa Supreme Court voted 4-3 to dissolve the injunction and let the ban go into effect.
Speaking during the news conference on Monday, Dr. Emily Boevers, an OB-GYN from Waverly, said “it is very, very clear that women are being harmed by these bans.”
“Because of my adherence to HIPAA and my respect for their very, very personal stories, I cannot give you details,” Boever explained. “But I have requested that anyone that I have heard of being harmed by this ban, when they are ready and when they have completed mourning and healing from what are very traumatic and heartbreaking circumstances, that they share their stories so that Iowans can see.”
The doctor, who is the founder and president of Iowans for Health Liberty, added, “Beyond the medical harms of having to wait for care, having care being denied or delayed, having to travel sometimes across state lines for life-threatening health circumstances, there’s the emotional and psychological trauma of being in a place and living in a state where your government refuses to allow you to access standard-of-care medicine.”
Boever said it’s important for voters to understand “this abortion ban has related issues that are so much broader and have such a wider impact … [T]he government putting themselves in the exam room and limiting the choices of its citizens to make very personal medical decisions has a profound effect on the whole state. On education, on what people want to come here to train, on what people want to come here to practice medicine, on nurses who want to work in labor and deliveries or not. On the economy, on whether or not women can participate fully in the economy, can hold jobs, can plan the families that they want. On the existing children and families, when the mothers are sick or face life-threatening health consequences.”
“… It is not clear-cut. It is not the situation that people holding up pictures of infants in the State Capitol want you to think about,” Boevers said. “These are real lives of real Iowans being negatively affected by this.”
Iowa Democrats have made restoring reproductive freedom a central message in campaigns for the state legislature and for Congress this year. Seltzer & Co. hasn’t conducted a survey on the legislative races for the Iowa Poll this year, but on Monday, the Register published the results of the poll on party preference in the Congressional races conducted earlier this month.
Overall, likely voters in the state said they preferred Republicans to represent them in Congress over Democrats, by a margin of 52-44. The poll did not use the names of any congressional candidate, instead only asking about generic party preference.
A majority of poll respondents in three of the state’s four congressional districts said they preferred a Republican. In both the 2nd and the 3rd District, likely voters preferred a Republican over a Democrat by the same margin as likely voters statewide, 52-44. In the 4th District, one of the most solidly Republican congressional districts in the country, the margin was 57-38.
The 1st Congressional District, which includes Iowa City and Davenport, was the lone exception in the poll. Likely voters in the district preferred a Democrat over a Republican 49 percent to 46 percent. That’s a significant change from the previous Iowa Poll conducted in June, in which likely voters in the 1st District favored a Republican over a Democrat, 53-41.
Both the survey of opinions on abortion and the generic congressional candidate matchups were part of the Iowa Poll conducted between Sept. 8-11, 2024.
“The margin of error for the individual congressional districts ranges from plus or minus 7.1 percentage points in the 1st District to 8 percentage points in the 3rd District,” according to the Register.
