Iowa leaders want its halted abortion law to go into effect. The state’s high court will rule Friday

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Supreme Court is expected to rule on the state’s temporary lockdown on Friday abortion lawwhich bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and before many women know they are pregnant.

Now that the law is on hold, abortion is legal in Iowa until 20 weeks of pregnancy. On Friday, the justices could uphold or overturn a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked enforcement of the law, with or without comment on whether the law itself is constitutional. Both the law’s supporters and the abortion providers who opposed it were bracing for the various possibilities.

The Supreme Court’s long-awaited ruling will be the latest in a years-long legal battle over abortion restrictions in the state, which escalated when the Iowa Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court overturned both decisions establishing a constitutional right to abortion.

Most Republican-led states in the country have restricted abortion access since 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Currently, 14 states have almost total bans at all stages of pregnancy, and three ban abortions after about six weeks.

The Iowa law passed in one day with only Republican support special session last July. A legal challenge was filed the next day by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, Planned Parenthood North Central States and the Emma Goldman Clinic.

The law was in effect for several days before a district court judge puts it on holda decision Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds appealed.

The Iowa Supreme Court has not yet decided whether previous rulings that applied an “undue burden test” to abortion laws should stand. The undue burden test is an intermediate level of analysis that asks whether laws pose too great a barrier to abortion.

The state argued that the law should be analyzed using a rational basis test, the least stringent approach for assessing legal challenges, and that the court should simply assess whether the government has a legitimate interest in restricting the proceeding.

Attorney Eric Wessan, who represented the state during oral arguments in April, said the court had already indicated what was appropriate in this case when they ruled that there is no “fundamental right” to abortion in the state constitution.

“This court has never recognized a quasi-fundamental or fundamental right before,” he said.

But Peter Im, an attorney for Planned Parenthood, told the justices that there are basic constitutional rights at stake that are worth the court’s consideration. He wants to determine whether the burden on people who want an abortion is not too heavy.

“It is emphatically the role and duty of this court to say how the Iowa Constitution protects individual rights, how it protects bodily autonomy, how it protects the rights of Iowans to exercise dominion over their own bodies,” he said .