Earlier this week, an overwhelming majority of the Iowa legislature voted to protect the lives of unborn children with detectable heartbeats, and Iowa governor Kim Reynolds plans to sign the bill into law on Friday.
Reynolds deserves credit for achieving this victory for life by calling the legislature back into a special session for the sole purpose of passing it. She also deserves credit for speaking with moral clarity. “I believe the pro-life movement is the most important human-rights cause of our time,” Reynolds said last week when calling the legislature back. She already signed a nearly identical bill into law in 2018, but last month the Iowa supreme court deadlocked 3–3 in a case that blocked the 2018 law from taking effect. Three justices left an injunction in place partly under the theory that the legislature didn’t expect the 2018 law to take effect ever and might not pass the same law today.
“The Iowa Supreme Court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said after the state house voted 56–34 and the state senate voted 32–17 to pass the new heartbeat bill. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”
Twenty-three states now have laws on the books protecting the lives of unborn babies at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier. While several laws remain held up in state court, the laws that are in effect are saving tens of thousands of lives per year.
The usual suspects in the media and the abortion-industrial complex are up to their usual tricks, attempting to sow confusion about the heartbeat law and turn public opinion against it. The news pages of the Des Moines Register reported on Tuesday that “medical professionals say it’s misleading to claim an embryo has a heartbeat at six weeks of gestation.” For expert advice, the Register turned to Sarah Traxler, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, who told the paper: “In medicine, we would never refer to it as a ‘fetal heartbeat.’” In fact, Planned Parenthood’s own website said for many years that “a very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop” by six weeks of pregnancy.
It was only sometime after the Dobbs decision in 2022 that Planned Parenthood scrubbed that sentence from its website, which now tells readers that that basic beating heart is mere “cardiac activity” of “part of the embryo.” These word games might be amusing if they weren’t intended to deny the humanity of a vulnerable group of human beings and mark them fit for death.
The law includes exceptions for cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal-health conditions, and when the life or physical health of the mother is in danger. But the abortion lobby is also trying to stoke fears that doctors might need to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent danger in order to treat mothers facing life-threatening conditions. The Iowa law plainly defers to the reasonable medical judgment of physicians when treating a condition that endangers the life of the mother or creates a serious risk to her physical health, and the law includes no requirement that the threat be imminent before doctors act. But cases have emerged over the past year of hospitals wrongly delaying care, and it is vitally important for officials in Iowa to cut through the disinformation and convey to hospitals that they are free to provide immediate treatment whenever serious pregnancy complications arise. Earlier this year, Nebraska provided a useful model for providing such clarity, when the state’s chief medical officer sent out a letter to health-care professionals explaining that there is no requirement under the abortion law to wait until a condition becomes dire.
The abortion lobby and its friends want to portray laws protecting unborn babies as harsh. Pro-life officials have a continuing duty to ensure all hospitals understand that those laws are in fact humane, providing protections to the life of both mother and child.