Iowa Republicans just blinked
The 2021 session of the Iowa Legislature has largely read like a Reich-wing wish list. From suppressing the votes of non-white Republicans to taking away control of school districts to determine when it is safe for students to return to school to making it easier for domestic abusers and felons to obtain firearms. And that’s just what passed the legislature and CovidKim Reynolds signed into law. Unconstitutional garbage like laws stating that state agencies and local governments could not implement Federal orders were seriously considered but did not make it through the funnel. Along with stripping tenure from professors teaching in public institutions, which would’ve turned the state into an educational backwater.
But there is one area where the Iowa Legislature is looking to back away from going full on Handmaiden’s Tale. Apparently, some providers and institutions here in Iowa were requiring women to get permission from spouses for medical procedures to be done—namely hysterectomies. There were tales of women who had to call their husbands from pre-op before the doctors would proceed with the operations. A new bill in the Iowa Legislature seeks to forbid doctors from requiring permission from husbands to proceed with hysterectomies.
However, legislative members of the GQP do not deserve any points for doing this. They only care about bodily autonomy when it’s convenient for them. They would be all for requiring permission from a pastor, husband/boyfriend, parents, and so on if it was a case of a woman needing to end her pregnancy to save her life. They support insurance companies who deny life-saving procedures as a matter of course because it would mean a few less dollars for their billionaire executives.
If the Iowa GQP wanted to show concern for people in this state, a lot more would be required than just this token measure.
