Rekha Basu

rbasu@dmreg.com

As suddenly as they announced it, Iowa House Republicans withdrew a piece of legislation that would have banned abortions as early as six weeks of pregnancy, or once a fetal heartbeat could be detected, which would have effectively banned all abortions. But not before Democrats on the House Human Resources Committee spent a frantic 30 hours trying to figure out what they could do to protect Iowa women’s constitutional right to choose.

The answer is, not much.

Republicans have control of the Iowa House, Senate and governor’s office, so bills can be passed and signed without Democratic support. Even a filibuster is not an option under House rules. All the Democrats could hope for was to rally public opinion against the bill before it went to a vote by Friday's deadline to get through the legislative funnel.

“This is extreme stuff," declared Democratic Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell of Ames by phone Tuesday night, as she awaited an abruptly scheduled committee meeting, which didn't come to pass. “It’s a huge assault on a woman’s right to make any decision on her reproduction.”

But Rep. Shannon Lundgren, the bill’s floor manager, made her agenda plain, telling reporters, "Republicans ran for office on pro-life campaigns.”

Fulfilling that agenda is their prerogative, but only to a point. Members of the House's Human Resources Committee tacked the amendment onto a 20-week abortion ban bill that had already passed the Senate. They did so even knowing it would likely end up in court for violating the constitutional standard established by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Roe v. Wade ruling held that women have the right to get abortions up to the point of fetal viability. A similar fetal heartbeat law passed by North Dakota in 2013 has gone unenforced because of legal challenges. Fortunately, other Republican lawmakers in Iowa's House thought better of the proposed amendment.,

Iowa anti-abortion legislators are flouting science with some of their bills, including a previous one, also withdrawn, that would have given a fetus personhood status from the moment of conception. Lundgren has said, “As pro-life legislators, we truly do believe that life begins at conception.”

She is free to believe whatever she wants as a matter of personal faith. But that doesn’t justify the distortion of scientific fact or the imposition of religious beliefs on the public. Even the Iowa Catholic Conference recognized that. "We do support life at conception, but at the same time, I don't think our courts are in that place where something like that could stand up," the Iowa Catholic Conference's executive director, Tom Chapman, was quoted saying in Wednesday’s Register.

A vigorous opponent of such legislation as unscientific is, ironically, an organization dedicated to helping people have babies through reproductive technologies. The president of the Washington D.C.-based American Society for Reproductive Medicine took a strong public stand, writing in its February bulletin that the idea life begins at conception is in the same league as "fake news" and "disinformation."

Though intended to make abortion illegal, such laws would hamper women's efforts to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization by making those who handle lab embryos susceptible to manslaughter charges if an embryo didn't survive, Richard J. Paulson argued.

“Life is a continuum,” Paulson wrote. “The egg cell is alive, and it has the potential to become a zygote (a single-celled embryo)” if fertilized by sperm. The resulting cell is also alive, but “from a biological perspective, no new life has been created, because it is nearly identical to the egg cell,” he wrote.

“The pre-implantation embryo is essentially an aggregate of stem cells, which has the potential to produce a pregnancy."

Anti-abortion lawmakers may have won election on that platform in their districts, but they don't speak for the majority, as pollster J. Ann Selzer found in a pre-election sample of 1,003 likely voters across America last August. Selzer, who also conducts the Register's Iowa Poll, polled people about abortion for the Public Leadership Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

She found that 69 percent of respondents did not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. The results were even more significant when the 28 percent of respondents who said they were most opposed to abortion were questioned further. Of those, 60 percent thought women seeking abortions should be able to opt out of getting a sonogram or being forced to wait, and 56 percent found "very convincing" a statement reading, in part, "Every person’s situation is different, and we should respect that this decision is (a woman's) to make, with her family and in accordance with her faith.”

Most significantly, only 19 percent of the group that was most opposed to abortion remained that way after hearing the follow-up questions; 30 percent ended up opposing any restrictions.

While it's a relief that the amendment to the abortion bill was pulled, the original bill banning abortions after 20 weeks was broadened. Now even pregnancies resulting from rape and incest or with fetal anomalies could not be terminated.

Lawmakers should stop playing God and let doctors and patients make medical decisions for themselves.