The Iowa Supreme Court has upheld an injunction from 2019 that blocked the state’s heartbeat law from going into effect handing an unexpected victory to the abortion industry and a severe blow to those fighting to protect the right to life of the preborn.
For almost 50 years, pro-life Americans had to watch as one state pro-life law after another was struck down by federal courts. Then, last year, only weeks apart, both the US Supreme Court and the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the precedents that established the federal and state “rights” to abortion.
Absent the federal or state legal obstacles to protecting the right to life of the unborn, Iowa’s pro-life governor, Kim Reynolds petitioned the Iowa Supreme Court to allow the state to begin enforcing the heartbeat law she had originally signed in 2019 and which had been blocked based on the now overturned court cases.
Today, a divided court, inexplicably decided to leave in place the injunction even though both the federal and state constitutional “rights” to abortion have been overturned.
Most shockingly, the judge who authored the pro-abortion opinion concluded his opinion with a defiant and barbaric paragraph.
“It would be ironic and troubling for our court to become the first state supreme court in the nation to hold that trash set out in a garbage can for collection is entitled to more constitutional protection than a woman’s interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body.”
Judge Thomas Waterman
The dehumanizing and unscientific language used by Justice Waterman is commonly used among pro-abortion activists.
The typical pro-abortion argument ignores the presence of the child in the womb and views the pregnant woman as the sole bearer of legal rights.
While most pro-abortion judges tend to simply ignore the rights of the child by unscientifically referring to the preborn child as merely a part of the woman’s “own body”, Justice Waterman’s analogy to trash, clearly intended to defend the rights of women over those of trash, also happens to dehumanize the child in the womb as having even fewer rights than trash.
While the analogy may not have been intentional it is precisely apposite, as it shows how legalized abortion takes away the personhood rights of the preborn child, and if a preborn child is not a person, then what is it?
Pro-abortion activists have often referred to the child in the womb as nothing more than a clump of cells or a tumor.
With his analogy to garbage, Justice Waterman just took the dehumanization of the preborn child, so common in the arguments justifying abortion, to an entirely new low.