Iowa Republicans have blocked a personhood bill from advancing in the Legislature that would have made it a felony offense to “cause the death” of an “unborn person” — language that prompted concerns that the measure would criminalize in vitro fertilization.
The bill passed the GOP-controlled state House last week, but the Republican-led Senate declined to take it up after the chairman of the Senate committee that would have initially debated it refused to do so.
Sen. Brad Zaun, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, told The Associated Press that he didn’t advance the bill during the committee's meeting Wednesday, its last before a Friday legislative deadline, because of concerns over “unintended consequences” the measure could end up creating for IVF care in the state.
Zaun didn’t immediately respond to questions.
The bill to criminalize the death of an "unborn person" did not provide any protections for embryos created via IVF. Democrats and reproductive rights advocates said that meant it could easily be interpreted to criminalize IVF care and services.
“This Iowa bill shows that if left to their own devices, Republicans will try to push personhood and other bills to control women’s bodies in virtually every state they possibly can. The only reason this bill was stopped was because of Iowa Democrats and heroic allies shining light on how this bill that would have effectively outlawed IVF in the state, similar to what we saw in Alabama last month," said Sam Paisley, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the national Democratic arm that helps oversee state legislative races.
House passage of the bill quickly inserted Iowa directly into the national battle over protections for IVF.
The House voted last Thursday just hours after Republican lawmakers in Alabama — trying to curtail the severe fallout over a state Supreme Court ruling that equated embryos with children — enacted a bill intended to protect IVF. The Alabama court’s ruling prompted broader concerns that conservative measures targeting abortion elsewhere would also go after the fertility procedure.
The Iowa bill said that “a person who causes the death of an unborn person without the consent of the pregnant person” is “guilty of a class ‘A’ felony” and that “a person who unintentionally causes the death of an unborn person” is “guilty of a class ‘B’ felony.”
In Iowa, a class A felony is the most serious criminal offense under the law, punishable by up to a mandatory prison life sentence — without the possibility of parole. A class B felony is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
The bill defined an “unborn person” as a human “individual organism” from “fertilization to live birth.”
It did not include any protections that would specifically or broadly apply to IVF. For example, the bill did not include clarifying language that many reproductive rights advocates have said serves as protection for IVF, like clarifying the term “unborn person” as having to be “in utero” or “carried in the womb.”
Reproductive rights advocates say those phrases serve to make the statues enforceable only when an embryo or a fetus is being carried in the womb — not outside the womb, as in the early phases of IVF.
