Iowa’s Supreme Court kept abortion from effectively being outlawed in the state by not actually reaching a decision in a case. How could that be? That’s because the six justices voting in the appeal deadlocked 3-3 on Friday. So that means the district court’s ruling, which blocked a six-week ban from taking effect, will stand.
In 2019, the district court blocked Iowa’s so-called fetal heartbeat law, which would ban abortions at about six weeks — before many women know they’re pregnant. Of course, that was before the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade a year ago, throwing abortion rights into chaos nationwide.
After that Dobbs ruling opened the door for states to ban abortion, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds tried to put the heartbeat law into action. Yet, with one of the Iowa justices recused from the case, the remaining six split, resulting in the law continuing to be blocked.
Procedurally, it’s an unusual situation that failed to produce an actual opinion of the court. Nonetheless, justices wrote opinions explaining themselves — and taking judicial jabs at one another.
Summing up the three justices’ opinion who voted against Reynolds, one of those justices wrote that it would be “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.” An opinion from the other side countered that the Iowa Legislature had already legislated the law in question; there just wasn’t a majority in this case to exercise discretion to act on it. At any rate, because of this strange stalemate, the law remains blocked and abortion remains legal in Iowa for now — that is, through about 20 weeks.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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