Anti-abortion activists push for limit on abortion pills during Iowa March for Life

DES MOINES — Maggie DeWitte told a crowd gathered Saturday in the Iowa Capitol Building Rotunda that they had a lot of reasons to celebrate.

DeWitte, the executive director of anti-abortion advocacy group Pulse Life Advocates, highlighted victories such as the closure of Planned Parenthood clinics in Iowa and the passage of fetal development curriculum requirements in public schools.

She also emphasized that anti-abortion activists still have more work left to do.

“This session, we had a big victory for life. Until this year, in Iowa schools, human growth and development education only began at birth. Now, thanks to our pro-life Legislature and our pro-life governor, the prenatal growth and development bill has passed and signed into law this last month,” DeWitte said as attendees cheered. “As we look forward to next legislative session, as always, we will work with legislators to pass our gold standard — life at conception.”

On Saturday, anti-abortion activists gathered at the Iowa Capitol for the annual March for Life rally, where attendees prayed and praised Republican state lawmakers for passing Senate File 175, which will require Iowa schools to include specific instruction and visual materials on pregnancy and fetal development, including a video, along with health curriculum for students in grades five through 12.

“As we gather here today, we have a lot of work ahead of us,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said. “Don't get me wrong, but we have so much to celebrate and to be grateful for the answers to our prayers, those prayers that we've been praying for decades, many have been answered.”

Before marching around the Iowa Capitol in 90-degree weather, speakers also unveiled their next primary advocacy focus: restricting access to abortion pills in Iowa.

Pulse Life Advocates and other anti-abortion organizations are teeing up a piece of legislation for next session, which they call the “Black Market Abortion Pill Bill,” that DeWitte said would put safeguards around the medication, adding it is advocates’ “next logical step.”

“What we're looking at as our biggest threat right now is the abortion pills, and particularly the online abortion,” DeWitte told the Quad-City Times. “It (the bill) would really showcase what we know to be true is that these drugs are dangerous and that these women need to have information.”

Under the bill, those looking to get mifepristone, a medication that blocks a hormone called progesterone that is needed for a pregnancy to continue, would be required to have an in-person visit with a doctor, a prescription and receive follow-up care. It would also require that abortion pills be listed as controlled substances, DeWitte said.

DeWitte said 1 in 10 women experience adverse effects after taking the abortion pill, citing a recently published study from the right-leaning think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center. The study has not been peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal and reproductive rights advocates have criticized it, arguing it's not supported by science.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also cited the study as a reason to restrict access to mifepristone when he directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to review restrictions around the medication in May.

The FDA has found that performing abortions using mifepristone followed by misoprostol is safe and effective.

After the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that had established a federal right to abortion, the rate of medication abortions in the country increased, making up 63 percent of all abortions in 2023 compared to 53 percent in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that supports abortion rights.

In 2023, 76 percent of abortions in Iowa were provided through medication, according to KFF, a nonprofit with a focus on health policy.

After a law banning abortion when cardiac activity is detected, which can be as early as six weeks of pregnancy, went into effect last July, abortions in the state decreased by 38 percent in the second half of the year, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Researchers behind the study said the decrease could be attributed to medicated abortions and Iowans going to other states to receive procedures.

During the 2025 legislative session, Republican lawmakers introduced House Study Bill 186, which would have required health care providers in Iowa to tell patients that it may be possible to reverse the effects of a medication abortion. Reproductive rights advocates said the bill would mislead people into thinking medication abortions are unsafe and reversible. The bill made it out of committee but did not make it to the House floor.

Jennie Bradley Lichter, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told attendees at Saturday's march that it is important for them to keep advocating for closures of reproductive health clinics and backing anti-abortion legislation, including restrictions on mifepristone.

Last month, Planned Parenthood North Central States announced that it will close eight reproductive health clinics in the Upper Midwest, including four of Iowa’s six locations, citing a federal funding freeze pushed by President Donald Trump’s administration and potential cuts to Medicaid funding as the reasons for closure and staff layoffs.

“Our political and our cultural leaders take notice of events like this one, which are unmatched opportunities to show in the flesh the persistence and the doggedness and the power of the pro-life movement here in Iowa,” Bradley Lichter said. “Even here in Iowa, there's still a lot of work left to do, and today we have some specific policy goals to rally around … all of us here know that women deserve real, compassionate health care and genuine pregnancy support, not dangerous pills that are misleadingly pushed on women as a quick fix.”