Iowa Legislature introduces wave of abortion-related bills 

The 2024 Iowa House and Senate session began with a run of abortion-centered bills introduced by Republican lawmakers, which effectively targeted both abortion services as well as how abortion is viewed in Iowa.     

House File 2122, which was killed during the first funnel week of the session, would have banned the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol. Currently, the unaffiliated six-week abortion ban introduced by Gov. Kim Reynolds in the summer of 2023, which would ban all abortions from six weeks on, is still blocked by the Iowa Supreme Court and is under appeal by Reynolds. 

House Study Bill 621 is “a bill for an act relating to the nonconsensual causing of death of, or serious injury to, an unborn person, and providing penalties.” The bill also replaced the term human pregnancy with unborn person throughout its text.  

House File 2031, also referred to as “The Olivia Bill,” would require Iowa students from seventh to 12th grade to watch a short film depicting fetal development, describing in explicit detail the growth of a fetus. The video has been criticized by abortion rights advocates as being medically inaccurate.

Mazie Stilwell, the director of public affairs with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa, said, “[The Baby Olivia Bill,] under the guise of depicting actual fetal development, presents personal beliefs and medically inaccurate information as scientific fact, so a really dangerous threat to human growth and development curriculum there.” 

This bill passed its subcommittee and was recommended by the Education Committee to pass on Feb. 19.

Senate File 2252 and HF 2167, both sponsored by the More Options for Mothers group, would allow government funding for alternative pregnancy centers, often referred to as crisis pregnancy centers by Planned Parenthood supporters.

“These are fake women’s health clinics, plain and simple,” Stilwell said. “They exist to lure people, lure pregnant Iowans into their facility to convince them to not have an abortion at all costs.” 

Assistant Majority Leader Jon Dunwell, R-Newton, who sponsored the House bill, responded to questions about the bill. 

“This bill makes updates to the More Options for Maternal Support program that we created last session. The MOMS program, as we call it, focuses on promoting healthy pregnancies and childbirth through nonprofits that provide pregnancy support services.” 

According to a Des Moines Register poll, 61% of Iowans support access to abortion. Though abortion-related legislation is currently and has been rampant in Iowa, Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst, D-Windsor Heights, and associate professor of public relations at Drake, said that if a constitutional amendment to codify abortion rights in Iowa’s Constitution were up to the voters, it would easily pass. 

“The only way voters can sort of step up to the plate and weigh in on an issue is with the constitutional amendment,” Konfrst said. ”The [abortion amendment] has passed one general assembly. It needs to pass this session in order for it to go on the ballot this fall. Republicans are not going to pass it because they don’t want it to go to the voters.”

As ballot ventures that codify abortions into state constitutions have passed in all states where they’ve been introduced to the public, the Iowa Republican majority is keeping similar abortion measures at bay.

“What we’ve seen all across the country, including most recently in Ohio, is that when abortion is on the ballot, reproductive freedom wins every single time,” Stilwell said.

In regard to the current hold by the Iowa Supreme Court on the six-week abortion ban, Konfrst suggests that if the court were to decide tomorrow that the ban is unconstitutional, the abortion measure would be on the ballot this fall. 

“We might not hear about the case until June or May, in which case we will already be out of session,” Konfrst said. “We can either come back into session and do another piece of legislation that they think will be constitutional, or we can wait until the next session. We’ve got a lot of options, but everything is sort of on hold except for those bills — regarding abortion policy — until the [Iowa] Supreme Court decides on the constitutionality of the abortion ban from the summer.”

Though the six-week abortion ban is still being reviewed, restrictive abortion legislation has continued to be introduced. 

“Republicans in the legislature will stop at nothing until abortion is banned in Iowa,” Konfrst said. “The six-week ban on abortion is currently on hold while the courts consider it. I think that they’re basically trying to introduce their next step. If [Republicans] make abortion illegal, they would like to make sure the abortion pill is not accessible. They have concerns about access to birth control, and they have concerns about where pregnant moms go and so on. I think they’re just continuing their work to address the abortion issue in Iowa.”

Planned Parenthood staff and abortion rights advocates continue to push against this type of legislation.     

“Despite the fact that Iowans have said time and time again that they value reproductive freedoms, and a growing majority support safe and legal abortion, those matters of public opinion don’t seem to matter. So we see continued attacks on reproductive freedom, and this session is no different,” Stilwell said.

As of today, abortion is still legal in the state of Iowa.

Caroline Siebels-Lindquist is the president of Drake’s Students for Reproductive Justice.