Iowa lawmakers want to use their latest abortion ban to overturn Roe v. Wade

Iowa is on its way to turning one of the most severe restrictions on abortion in the country into law.

On Wednesday, state lawmakers passed a bill to ban abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is usually about six weeks into a pregnancy — and, critics charge, long before most women even know they’re pregnant. While the law will almost certainly spark legal challenges, advocates say that’s kind of the point.

“We created an opportunity to take a run at Roe v. Wade — 100 percent,” Republican state Senator Rick Bertrand told Reuters, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion more than four decades ago. Thanks to President Donald Trump’s appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court bench, many anti-abortion activists are confident that a ruling on abortion’s legality would fall in their favor.

“We at the state legislatures, especially Republican-controlled legislatures, have a responsibility to kind of reload,” Bertrand added to the New York Times. “We need to create vehicles that will allow the Supreme Court possibly to reach back and take this case, and to take up an anti-abortion case.”

In the past, state legislatures dominated by conservative lawmakers have tended to prioritize regulating abortion clinics, not the procedure itself. But abortion rights advocates say that’s changing.

“We’ve seen a major shift over this past year onto them passing legislation and pushing legislation to just outright ban abortion entirely,” Ashley Gray, a state policy adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told VICE News in a March interview, shortly before Mississippi passed a ban on all abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. (At the time, that measure — which has since been temporarily blocked by a court — was considered the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation.) Within the past year, Gray pointed out, state lawmakers across the country have introduced measures outlawing certain common abortion methods, as well as banning women from getting abortions on the basis of fetal abnormality or gender.

The Iowa bill does allow for some exceptions: Women whose lives are imperiled by their pregnancies would be able to get abortions, as would women whose pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. However, that provision only kicks in if they report the rape to law enforcement or health care provider within 45 days, or report the incest within 140 days.

Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has not said publicly whether she’ll sign the measure, but in a statement to NBC News, her press secretary Brenna Smith said, "Gov. Reynolds is 100 percent pro-life and will never stop fighting for the unborn.”

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Cover image: Ilana Panich-Linsman/Reuters