Abortion in Iowa will remain legal after a deadlocked high court on Friday declined to reinstate a six-week ban on the procedure.
The move, celebrated by abortion rights advocates as a “resounding victory for Iowans and reproductive freedom,” was a blow to Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who had asked the court to reinstate one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bans.
Following a 3-3 decision, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld a 2019 circuit court ruling that blocked a ban signed into law in 2018 that would restrict nearly all abortion procedures in the state after approximately six weeks of pregnancy — before many people even know that they’re pregnant.
The near-total abortion ban, which never went into effect, contained exceptions for medical emergencies, rape, incest and fetal abnormality.
The Iowa Supreme Court has seven members, all appointed by Republican governors. However, one of the justices, whose former law firm had represented an abortion provider, did not participate.
A district court had declined to reinstate the law late last year, leading the state to appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. Friday’s even split means the lower court decision blocking the law will remain in place.
“Each person deserves control of their body, and Iowans have that right, based on today’s court decision,” Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said in a statement Friday. “Abortion bans make pregnancy more dangerous than it already is, and it shouldn’t matter which state you live in.”
The Planned Parenthood North Central States serves communities in Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska.
Justice Thomas Waterman, one of three justices who denied Reynolds’ request, wrote that the state had asked the court to “do something that has never happened in Iowa history: to simultaneously bypass the legislature and change the law, to adopt rational basis review, and then to dissolve an injunction to put a statute into effect for the first time in the same case in which that very enactment was declared unconstitutional years earlier.”
“Three justices on this court … decline to take this unprecedented step,” he wrote.
Reynolds slammed the court’s ruling, saying it disregards Iowa voters “who elected representatives willing to stand up for the rights of unborn children’” and sides “with a single judge in a single county who struck down Iowa’s legislation based on principles that now have been flat-out rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“The fight is not over,” she added.