Iowa Republicans block personhood bill that could have threatened IVF from advancing

Iowa Republicans have blocked a personhood bill from advancing in the Legislature that would have made it a felony offense to “cause the death” of an “unborn person” — language that prompted concerns that the measure would criminalize in vitro fertilization.

The bill had passed the GOP-controlled state House last week, but the Republican-led Senate declined to take up the bill after the chairman of the state Senate committee that would have initially debated it refused to do so.

State Sen. Brad Zaun, the chair of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee, told the Associated Press that he didn’t advance the bill during the committee’s meeting on Wednesday, its last before a Friday legislative deadline, due to concerns over “unintended consequences” the measure could end up creating for IVF care in the state.

Zaun didn’t immediately respond to questions from NBC News.

The bill criminalizing the death of an “unborn person” did not provide any protections for embryos created via IVF. Democrats and reproductive rights advocates said that meant the measure could easily be interpreted to criminalize IFV care and services.

The state House’s passage of the bill quickly inserted the conservative midwestern state directly into the national battle over protections for IVF.

The vote in Iowa last Thursday came just hours after Republican lawmakers in Alabama — trying to curtail the severe fallout over a state Supreme Court ruling that equated embryos with children — enacted a bill intended to protect IVF. The Alabama court’s ruling prompted broader concerns that conservative measures targeting abortion elsewhere would also go after the fertility procedure.

The Iowa bill stated  that “a person who causes the death of an unborn person without the consent of the pregnant person” is “guilty of a class ‘A’ felony” and that “a person who unintentionally causes the death of an unborn person” is “guilty of a class ‘B’ felony.”

In Iowa, a class ‘A’ felony is the most serious criminal offense under the law and is punishable by up to a mandatory prison life sentence — without the possibility of parole. A class ‘B’ felony, under Iowa law, is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

The bill defined an “unborn person” as a human “individual organism” from “fertilization to live birth.”

It did not include any protections that would specifically or broadly apply to IVF. For example, the bill did not include clarifying language that many reproductive rights advocates have said serve as protections for IVF, like clarifying the term “unborn person” as having to be “in utero” or “carried in the womb.”

Reproductive rights advocates say those phrases serve to make the statues enforceable only in situations where the embryo or fetus is being carried in the womb — not outside the womb as is the case in the early phases of IVF.