Iowa’s top court rejects bid to implement abortion restrictions

Iowa’s Supreme Court issued a 3-3 decision Friday that rejects a bid to implement a highly restrictive abortion law passed in 2018, effectively keeping abortion legal in the state until 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The decision Friday ruled against lifting a 2019 injunction on a law passed in 2018 that would restrict nearly all abortions in the state after about six weeks. The law never went into effect. A majority ruling was required to overrule the injunction.

Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) asked the court in 2022 to reconsider the restrictive 2018 law, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and after the Iowa Supreme Court reversed its ruling maintaining abortion was a fundamental right in the state. 

In December 2022, the district court declined to revisit the 2018 law, but Reynolds appealed, and oral arguments were held in April 2023. 

The decision Friday was made largely on procedural grounds — the court ruled Reynolds’s 2022 appeal to the 2019 district court’s decision was too late. 

Lawmakers, therefore, are free to craft another law that mirrors the one passed in 2018. The makeup of the state’s high court is more conservative now than when the first law was passed, The Associated Press reported. Reynolds appointed five of the seven members of the court. 

Reynolds’s attempt to implement the roughly six-week ban coincides with many other Republican-led states that have taken steps to limit abortions following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that there is no federal right to an abortion.