Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird enjoyed suing the Biden administration. She filed or joined more than a dozen multi-state lawsuits against the federal government during her first year in office alone. At least a dozen more lawsuits followed in 2024.

Bird has often welcomed media coverage of her legal battles against Biden administration policies. Her office issued many press releases to announce new litigation or joint letters challenging the federal government.

But Bird’s office kept quiet about one case, which Iowa and sixteen other Republican-controlled states filed in the Northern District of Texas last September. Texas v. Becerra could prove catastrophic for Americans with disabilities. Not only are the plaintiffs seeking to vacate a federal rule prohibiting discrimination against disabled people in health care settings, they are also asking the court to declare a 1973 law known as Section 504 unconstitutional and unenforceable.

After reporters began asking questions about that lawsuit last week, Bird and her staff lied repeatedly about the scope of the case and the plaintiffs’ goals.

“Nothing promotes life like a forced hysterectomy preventing a woman from ever becoming pregnant again because she could not terminate a doomed pregnancy under the medical emergency exception,” wrote Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan Christensen near the end of her dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v Reynolds VI.

In that case, four Iowa Supreme Court justices ruled on June 28 that the state can enforce a near-total abortion ban (House File 732) while litigation proceeds in lower court. Reversing a Polk County District Court ruling, the majority determined the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed in showing the ban violates pregnant Iowans’ due process rights. The majority also declared that abortion restrictions are subject to “rational basis” review, which will make it far easier for the government to defend the law against the plaintiffs’ other constitutional claims.

Writing in dissent, the chief justice illuminated the suffering that will follow from this “giant step backward” for Iowa women. An equally remarkable opinion by Justice Edward Mansfield—the author of the 2022 decision that overturned Iowa’s abortion rights precedent—warned that the majority’s new approach to abortion cases “disserves the people of Iowa and their constitution.”

For the sixth time in the past decade, an abortion-related case is pending before the Iowa Supreme Court.

The only certainty is that the court will issue some majority opinion in the latest iteration of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland v Reynolds. All seven justices participated in the April 11 oral arguments.

The law at issue, adopted during a special legislative session last July, is almost identical to the near-total abortion ban at the center of last year’s case. But after Justice Dana Oxley recused herself from the 2023 litigation, the other justices split 3-3, leaving a permanent injunction on the 2018 abortion ban in place.

In all likelihood, the Iowa Supreme Court will decide before the end of June whether to lift the temporary injunction on the new abortion ban. Normally, it’s not advisable to guess how any justice will rule following oral arguments. We can draw more inferences here, because all seven justices have written or joined opinions that are relevant to the current case.

This post is designed to help readers understand the legal context and key arguments for each side.

Brenna Bird wasted no time putting her mark on the Iowa Attorney General’s office. Big changes commenced before the Republican’s formal swearing in on January 5.