Iowa’s Six-Week Abortion Ban Remains Enjoined After State High Court Ruling
- June 23, 2023
An evenly divided Iowa Supreme Court decision issued June 16 keeps in place a permanent injunction blocking the state’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” abortion law from taking effect.
A state trial court last year held Iowa’s ban on abortion after six weeks should remain enjoined pursuant to an injunction issued in 2019. The 3-3 decision, with one justice conflicted out of the case, affirmed the district court’s decision by operation of law. Given the case’s unusual posture, the decision has no precedential effect.
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. But 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 Governor Kim 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.
Three justices on the Iowa Supreme Court also rejected the “unprecedented effort to judicially revive a statute that was declared unconstitutional in a never-appealed final judgment four years ago.”
According to the opinion, the high court’s previous decision left the undue burden standard in place, and under that standard, the fetal heartbeat bill was unconstitutional when enacted. “In our view, it is legislating from the bench to take a statute that was moribund when it was enacted and has been enjoined for four years and then to put it into effect.”
The justices noted that “when the statute was enacted in 2018, it had no chance of taking effect” so the legislature was essentially passing a “hypothetical law.” The justices acknowledged that “such a statute might take effect [if enacted by the legislature now] given the change in the constitutional law landscape.”
Referring to prior precedent, the justices noted “[i]t would be ironic and troubling for our court to become the first state supreme court in the nation to hold that trash set out in a garbage can for collection is entitled to more constitutional protection than a woman’s interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body.”
The three other justices wrote separate opinions indicating they would reverse the district court order and remand with directions to dissolve the permanent injunction.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, Inc. v. Reynolds ex rel. State of Iowa, No. 22–2036 (Iowa June 16, 2023).