Legislation filed in the state of Iowa that would apply state homicide laws to protect preborn babies appears to have failed as a senior Republican lawmaker expresses opposition to the proposal.
Iowa Republican State Representative Zach Dieken recently introduced a bill that would include the category of “unborn child” in existing laws regarding “homicide and related crimes,” ensuring that “the rights of unborn children are protected from homicide and assault by the same criminal and civil laws protecting all other persons.” The bill thereby seeks to protect pregnant women from “being pressured to abort a child” and clarifies that miscarriages, situations of medical triage, and other instances of “unintentional death” for a preborn baby are not criminal offenses.
The bill nevertheless faced opposition from Iowa Republican State Representative Steven Holt, the chair of the Iowa House Judiciary Committee, who said in a statement that lawmakers would wait for the Iowa Supreme Court to finish deliberating on a heartbeat bill before “determining our next course of action.” He objected to the abortion abolition bill on the basis that the legislation would “allow mothers who abort their children to be prosecuted and jailed,” asserting that “no credible person in the pro-life community” believes such a notion is “acceptable.”
Dieken said in an interview with The Sentinel that the “strong hesitancy to punish women for killing their children” is an “inconsistency” made evident by the fact that children outside the womb are already protected under the law even when their own mothers harm them.
“The inconsistency lies in the fact that we already punish mothers for killing their children,” the lawmaker remarked. “There are sad instances where that happens already, and as someone who has been in law enforcement for almost twelve years now, I have come across and been a part of situations where that has happened, and those mothers are prosecuted under the law.”
Dieken reiterated that the bill merely establishes “equal protection under the law” for all humans. “We know from the Scriptures and from science that life begins from the moment of fertilization,” he said. “The bill would not create or update any penalties for current Iowa law, but simply would say that a person in the womb is indeed protected under Iowa law.”
Statutes enacted in several pro-life and conservative states purport to ban abortion but forbid officials from prosecuting mothers even if they willfully murder their preborn children. Supporters of abolition bills contend that while women who are forced into abortions should not face penalties, blanket exemptions from prosecution enable the advent of self-managed abortion pills, which composes an increasingly large share of abortions in the United States.
Dieken additionally referenced the work of British slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce, who proposed the same law calling for an immediate end of the slave trade throughout his entire political career until his colleagues and the broader public supported the effort. “The way forward is just consistency: Roe v. Wade was fifty years ago, so I think we’ve been consistently shown that the incremental approach really hasn’t gotten us anywhere,” Dieken said. “It’s introducing the same bill, pushing the same truths. It’s not compromising. It’s getting the truth in front of people’s eyes and having the Lord expose and convict them of their inconsistencies.”
Similar bills have been introduced across the nation in recent months: Oklahoma Republican State Senator Dusty Deevers filed a bill that notes the “sanctity of innocent human life created in the image of God” by establishing that homicide laws apply for preborn children in the same way they apply “when the victim is a person who had been born alive,” yet Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt likewise said he objects to prosecuting women who seek an abortion.
Indiana Republican State Representative Lorissa Sweet introduced a bill contending that “innocent human life, created in the image of God, should be equally protected under the laws from fertilization to natural death,” while Missouri Republican State Senator Mike Moon filed a bill to acknowledge that the “unborn child at every stage of development has all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”
