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Abortion restrictions mark another victory for Iowa Republicans. Will it hurt them in 2024?
Republicans point to recent election successes, while Democrats say this new law and the next election will be different
Jul. 17, 2023 5:00 am
DES MOINES — Abortion is now illegal in Iowa once cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus.
It is the latest in a long string of conservative policy victories and accomplishments for Iowa Republicans who have possessed full control of the state lawmaking process since 2017.
At each legislative turn over those six-plus years — through dramatic, conservative changes to state laws governing elections, collective bargaining for public employees, taxes and more — Iowa voters have rewarded Republicans in the following election.
Might this issue, this new law be different?
The legislators from each party and policy advocates on each side of abortion -- it will come as no surprise -- disagree over what impact this latest abortion legislation will have on Iowa statehouse elections next year.
Two elections experts in the state say the new law could present an opportunity for Democrats to turn out more motivated voters.
“This is an emotional issue, and emotion is a thing that can be a really powerful political motivator, especially negative emotion,” University of Northern Iowa political science professor Donna Hoffman said. “Democrats have an opportunity here.”
The latest abortion bill
Iowa Republicans last week approved another version of their so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill, which is designed to ban abortions once a “fetal heartbeat” — defined in the law as “cardiac activity, the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac” — is detected by an abdominal ultrasound.
The bill contains exceptions under which a physician can conduct an abortion: in cases of rape and incest — provided those incidents were reported to authorities in a timeframe specified in the bill — when the mother’s life is at risk, or when a fetus shows abnormalities that suggest it will not survive.
Republican lawmakers passed the bill during a special session of the Iowa Legislature last Tuesday, and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it into law Friday at a Christian conservative organization’s political event in Des Moines with six Republican presidential candidates.
The latest restrictions are a near-duplicate of a law that was passed in 2018, but immediately was blocked by the state courts.
Abortion access a winner elsewhere
Recent election data — including in the 2022 midterms — has showed that when abortion rights are directly on the ballot, it drives Democratic registration and increases turnout for Democrats. And there have been multiple victories for abortion rights advocates over the past two years, even in typically conservative states.
The first abortion-related election after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a woman’s right to have an abortion came in Kansas in the summer of 2022. A ballot referendum came down strongly in favor of abortion rights, even though Kansas leans Republican and Trump won the state handily in 2020.
In the November 2022 midterm elections, Republicans underperformed expectations in many states across the country, with some attributing those losses to energy around abortion rights issues in the wake of the Roe v. Wade repeal. An anti-abortion constitutional amendment failed in red-state Kentucky, while Michigan voted to enshrine abortion rights into its state constitution.
And in Wisconsin this past spring, the liberal candidate won an election to the state’s supreme court after a campaign in which abortion was the top issue.
The victories have buoyed the hopes of Iowa Democrats, who believe the state’s new abortion legislation will be just as electorally unpopular here as it has been in other states.
Public opinion tilts to abortion access
Democrats also feel emboldened by public opinion, which continues to be on the side of access to abortion, in Iowa and nationally.
Just more than three out of five Iowans -- 61 percent -- said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll published earlier this year.
That tracks closely with a recent national poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which found that 64 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The AP-NORC poll also found that 73 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal at six weeks of pregnancy — roughly the target of the new Iowa law, which often is before a person is aware they’re pregnant.
Abortion policy as voter motivation
While there will not be a direct abortion issue on Iowa voters’ ballots in 2024, Hoffman said Democrats likely will use the new, Republican-approved state restrictions as an issue to motivate candidates and voter turnout.
Christopher Larimer, also a political science professor at the University of Northern Iowa, said the issue could help Democrats boost turnout.
“I think it’s probably more of a voter turnout thing on the Democratic side. I think it’s a mobilizing issue for Democratic voters,” Larimer said.
However, unlike those other states and many others across the country in 2022, Iowa Republicans did not falter in the 2022 elections. In fact, they grew their legislative majorities’ control of state government.
And abortion also drives passionate feelings among many Republican voters. So Republicans may use the bill as a motivational campaign tool themselves, and some may argue that the Legislature should enact even stricter bans, Hoffman said.
“Taking credit for what they have done, and then seeking to go further is something that could potentially be used,” Hoffman said.
Republicans buoyed by recent successes
Iowa Republicans point out that they have been forthcoming in advocating for abortion-restricting policies throughout their time in command of the state lawmaking process, and in those six-plus years have grown their majorities at the Iowa Capitol.
Reynolds signed the first fetal heartbeat bill into law in 2018; later that year, she won her first election since being promoted from lieutenant governor the year before. In her 2022 campaign, she pledged to continue her pursuit of more abortion restrictions; she won re-election by 19 percentage points.
“We have a pro-life governor, we have not only a majority but a super majority (in the Iowa Legislature), and that is the will of the people,” Maggie DeWitte, executive director of the anti-abortion organization Pulse Life Advocates, said while discussing abortion policy for this weekend’s episode of “Iowa Press” on Iowa PBS.
That track record gives Iowa Republicans confidence they are doing right by their constituents, and will not be punished electorally in 2024.
“Have any of you ever heard me say anything other than that I was staunchly pro-life and that I would do anything and everything to defend the right to life of every human being? And how many times have I been reelected,” Iowa Senate President Amy Sinclair, a third-term Republican from Allerton who managed the latest bill during debate, asked reporters after Tuesday’s special legislative session.
“I’ve been conservative. And I’ve been honest in my conservatism. I’ve acted on what I said on the campaign trail,” Sinclair said. “I’ve never, ever been anything but openly vocal in my defense of the preservation, the support (and) the protection of all human lives.”
Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs for the women’s reproductive health care and abortion services provider Planned Parenthood, conceded on “Iowa Press” that abortion restrictions have not swayed Iowa voters in previous, recent elections.
“That was not their leading priority in those elections, and we could speculate all day as to why that may have been,” Stilwell said. “But going forward we know that the only way to reclaim reproductive freedom and that bodily autonomy here in the state is going to be at the ballot box.”
Different circumstances
However, the 2024 elections could be different, for myriad reasons.
Hoffman pointed out that most Iowa Republicans did not make abortion a central issue in their 2022 campaigns. And Republican statehouse leadership at the time of the election was pursuing abortion restrictions through the legal system by asking the Iowa courts to unblock the 2018 bill.
And Jennifer Konfrst, the minority-party Iowa House Democrats’ leader from Windsor Heights, said voters may not have been swayed by abortion policy previously because the attempted restrictions in Iowa were still blocked by the state courts.
The new law went into effect once Reynolds signed it Friday. Abortion rights advocates have once again challenged the restrictions in court; a district court judge is expected to rule this week on a request to halt enforcement of the new law until the state courts can rule on the law’s constitutionality.
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“Unfortunately, now there will be consequences that voters will see (if the courts do not block the new law),” Konfrst told reporters after Tuesday’s special session. “In 2022, abortion was still legal up to 20 weeks (of pregnancy), and it was a hypothetical. Now, sadly, it’s real.
“There will be women who die. There will be women who leave the state. There will be consequences that are dire. And Iowans will see that as a result of this legislation. The landscape will be different in 2024 because abortion will be effectively illegal in the state.”
Konfrst said her fellow Democrats have heard from Republican and no-party voters, particularly in suburban areas of the state, who are upset by Republican lawmakers’ push to further restrict abortions.
The November 2024 general election is 16 months away.
Tom Barton contributed to this report.
Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com
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