Gov. Kim Reynolds has been a featured speaker at the Family Leadership Summit every year during her governorship. When she took the stage at Community Choice Credit Union Convention Center in Des Moines for this year’s event on July 11, Reynolds — who announced in April she is not running for reelection — reflected on her time in office and the legislation supported by the Family Leader she’s signed into law.
The Family Leadership Summit is the Family Leader’s biggest annual event. The rightwing Christian political organization is one of the most important special interest groups in Iowa Republican politics, and has been one of Reynolds’ most loyal supporters. The governor has been as loyal to the Family Leader as it has been to her.
In 2023, after Republicans in the Iowa Legislature pushed through one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country during a one-day special session called by the governor, Reynolds delayed signing the bill until she could do so on stage at that year’s Family Leadership Summit.
Reynolds didn’t mention her 2023 photo-op bill signing in her July 11 speech, but did begin by saying “there’s been no greater responsibility, and none more rewarding, than the task of instilling a culture of life in our state.” The law banning almost all abortions in the state after six weeks (before many women know they’re pregnant) is at the center of the governor’s “culture of life.”
Reynolds noted that the first six-week abortion ban she signed into law was passed in 2018. The governor did not hold a photo-op signing ceremony at that year’s Family Leadership Summit, probably because the bill was clearly unconstitutional, since Roe v. Wade was still in force. Also at that time, the Iowa Supreme Court still recognized the state constitution as providing strong protection for reproductive rights.
“So days later, it was challenged, as you all know too, by abortion providers, who do little to help women in crisis and really grossly misrepresent their services as health care,” Reynolds told the audience.
“But we were patient, we never gave up believing that truth would prevail and justice would be served,” she added.
Unlike some other conservative governors, Reynolds did not call for the legislature to ban abortion when the Republican-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Instead, she petitioned the courts to lift the permanent injunction on the 2018 abortion ban. Legally, it was a strategy with little merit that few thought would succeed. Politically, it allowed Reynolds to avoid answering questions about abortion as she was running for reelection that year, instead saying she had to wait for the courts to rule on her petition.
In June 2023, the Iowa Supreme Court decided not to issue an opinion on the governor’s unprecedented petition, leaving the permanent injunction in place. The next month, Reynolds called the one-day special session to pass a new six-week abortion ban as its sole topic.
That abortion ban was immediately challenged in court by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and the Emma Goldman Clinic. A district court judge issued a preliminary injunction, but when it reached the Iowa Supreme Court, the justices ruled 4-3 in favor of the near-total ban, creating “a constitutional rule that gives no weight to a woman’s autonomy over her body,” Justice Edward Mansfield, one of the court’s longest-serving members, wrote in his dissent.
Chief Justice Susan Christensen, Reynolds’ first appointee to the court, was even sharper in her dissent.
“Today, our court’s majority strips Iowa women of their bodily autonomy by holding that there is no fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy under our state constitution,” the chief justice wrote. “I cannot stand by this decision. The majority’s rigid approach relies heavily on the male-dominated history and traditions of the 1800s, all the while ignoring how far women’s rights have come since the Civil War era. It is a bold assumption to think that the drafters of our state constitution intended for their interpretation to stand still while we move forward as a society.”
Reynolds did not mention bodily autonomy at the Family Leadership Summit, either in 2022 or this year.
Instead, Reynolds called the passage of the abortion ban during the one-day special session “a victory that’s still worth celebrating in its own right.”
“But what matters more though is a victory that followed — the victories that followed,” the governor continued. “And as of today, abortions in Iowa are down more than 60 percent since the fall of Roe v. Wade.”
Access to abortion has been largely restricted, even though it remains legal up to six weeks for everyone, but Reynolds’ number isn’t quite correct, Isaac Maddow-Zimet of the Guttmacher Institute told Iowa Public Radio. The governor’s figures do not include Iowans who had medication abortions after telehealth consultations with out-of-state medical practitioners.
The governor also did not address people leaving the state for abortion care. Over 360 Iowans have accessed abortion care in Illinois since the ban went into effect, “a 200% increase,” according to a news release from the Chicago Abortion Fund and the Iowa Abortion Access Fund. The two groups partnered after Iowa’s ban went into effect to help abortion remain available to people who might otherwise have trouble affording or accessing such care. Overall, the news release said, the two nonprofits had assisted 870 Iowans “who were facing barriers to abortion care, 75% of whom traveled out-of-state for care.”
“These aren’t just numbers, they’re people navigating impossible situations,” Megan Jeyifo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, said in the news release. “They’re parents, students, your neighbors, your friends, your community members — forced to travel sometimes hundreds of miles for a basic healthcare need, or come up with hundreds of dollars on a tight turnaround to access care at home. We’ve helped Iowans book last-minute train tickets, drive overnight with young children, and secure lodging for multi-day procedures. Abortion bans and restrictions do not stop abortions. They just force people to access care under extreme pressure.”
In her remarks to the Family Leadership Summit, Gov. Reynolds told the audience “our work is not done.”
“We need to share this message across the country and make sure that we can change the hearts and minds in other states that aren’t moving in the direction that Iowa has moved.”
Along with the six-week abortion ban, the governor cited measures like the newly introduced family leave policy for state employees that provides four weeks of paid maternity leave and one week of paid paternity leave, as an example of her “culture of life.”
In her speech, Reynolds also celebrated the fact that after the abortion ban went into effect, four of the state’s six Planned Parenthood clinics closed. In a news release marking the one-year anniversary of the abortion ban, leaders of the Iowa Democratic Party addressed the impact of the closure of those clinics, “which provide[d] yearly cancer screenings and women’s health services.”
“This is devastating news in a state where the rate of OB-GYN physicians per capita is the lowest in the nation, where people living in one-third of our 99 counties do not have access to maternity care, and where 41 hospitals have closed their labor and delivery units since 2000.”
After celebrating her win on the abortion ban, the governor moved on to another accomplishment she said she is “equally proud of”: removing protections for gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act to make various forms of discrimination against trans and nonbinary Iowans legal again.
Iowa is the first state to ever eliminate part of its civil rights code, and Reynolds said that makes Iowa “a trailblazer.”
“Iowa has accomplished something no other state in the nation has even dared to attempt,” she said to applause from the crowd.
On Tuesday, the governor’s office sent out a statement in which Reynolds marked the first anniversary of the six-week abortion ban. The governor’s official statement was excerpted from the “culture of life” section of her Family Leadership Summit speech.