Iowa Supreme Court Should Allow State’s Six-Week Abortion Ban to Take Effect, Governor Urges
- February 17, 2023
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds in a February 13 brief urged the Iowa Supreme Court to dissolve a permanent injunction blocking the state’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” abortion law from taking effect.
Reynolds filed the brief after a state trial court last year held Iowa’s ban on abortion after six weeks should remain enjoined pursuant to the injunction, which was put in place in 2019.
The fetal heartbeat law prohibits, with certain narrow exceptions, abortions after an abdominal ultrasound detects fetal cardiac activity—typically around six weeks following a woman’s last menstrual period. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland challenged the law. In 2019, a state court held the law was unconstitutional and issued a permanent injunction.
The Iowa Supreme Court initially held in 2018 that a fundamental right to abortion existed under the Iowa Constitution. However, four years later, in June 2022, the court overruled that precedent, rejecting “the proposition that there is a fundamental right to an abortion in Iowa’s Constitution subjecting abortion to strict scrutiny.”
The state high court did not, at that time, decide what constitutional standard should replace strict scrutiny, and instead found the U.S. Supreme Court’s undue burden test remained the governing standard. A month later, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 142 S. Ct. 2228, 2242 (2022), overturning Roe v. Wade and holding that rational-basis review is the appropriate standard for constitutional challenges of state abortion regulations.
In a decision at the end of last year, the Iowa District Court for Polk County denied Reynold’s motion to dissolve the 2019 injunction, holding the Iowa rules of civil procedure did not provide a path for vacating the injunction more than one year after the judgment based on a change in law, and that the state failed to show the court had inherent authority to do so.
But Reynolds argued in the brief that the district court did have inherent authority to dissolve the injunction based on a substantial change in the law—i.e., the Dobbs decision and the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that the state's constitution does not include a fundamental right to an abortion.
In light of those developments, the high court should find that rational-basis review applies to state constitutional challenges to laws regulating abortion, Iowa’s fetal heartbeat law easily satisfies that standard, and that due to that substantial change in the law, the 2019 injunction must be dissolved, the brief said.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, Inc. v. Reynolds ex rel. State of Iowa, No. 22–2036 (Iowa brief filed Feb. 13, 2023).