Mariannette Miller-Meeks tries to have it both ways on abortion stance

Mariannette-Miller Meeks has called herself a moderate, rational figure on abortion. Her voting record tells a different story.

During election season, Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, representing Iowa’s First Congressional District, claims she’s the middle-of-the-road candidate when it comes to abortion policy. 

But when she’s actually voting in office, Miller-Meeks has supported strict abortion bans for years. She has an A+ rating from a major nationwide anti-abortion group because of her work against abortion rights in Congress.  

“Throughout my tenure in Congress and the Iowa Senate, I’ve consistently upheld a staunchly pro-life stance with exceptions for cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is endangered,” Miller-Meeks recently told the Des Moines Register.

However, in her first term in 2021, Miller-Meeks cosponsored the Life at Conception Act which would ban abortion nationwide without exceptions for any reason. It would also define embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception and grant them rights under the US Constitution.

This bill was referred to a House subcommittee and didn’t go any further, but it’s similar to the Alabama law that briefly ended IVF in the state. Miller-Meeks did not cosponsor it when it came up a second time.

In the same Des Moines Register piece, Miller-Meeks pointed to her support for a national abortion ban at 15 weeks after the first day of a person’s last period. That would not change Iowa’s near-total abortion ban, or any other stricter bans, she said, but it would override any state laws that protect abortion and the will of millions of voters.

It would make it more difficult to overturn Iowa’s ban too, which 59% of Iowans disapprove of, according to the latest Des Moines Register poll. In fact, 64% of Iowans agree abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Miller-Meeks called a 15-week national abortion ban a moderate position—even though it would force one upon states that have kept it legal since Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Other Republicans like Donald Trump have framed their successful effort to repeal Roe as a way to let states decide the issue.

Several times, Miller-Meeks has praised Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’ near-total abortion ban, which bans abortion before most people know they’re pregnant and went into effect this year at the end of July.

Unlike Rep. Zach Nunn (Republican, 3rd District), Miller-Meeks never voted for the near-total abortion ban, which passed in 2018 before her election to the Iowa Senate that year. The ban passed again in 2023 when Miller-Meeks and Nunn were both in Congress.

Iowa’s exceptions for rape and incest have reporting requirements, and the life of the mother exception isn’t defined. Iowa doctors have said they don’t have enough information to use the exceptions and they likely wouldn’t be usable anyway. Abortion bans in other states have demonstrated exceptions don’t work.

When she was in the Iowa Senate, Miller-Meeks backed similarly extreme legislation.

She voted for a fetal personhood law in 2019 which defines pregnancies as “unborn persons” and defines life starting at conception.

Miller-Meeks also voted for an amendment to the Iowa Constitution which would have explicitly said there’s no right to abortion in Iowa and paved the way for a total ban to go into effect. When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that there is no fundamental right to abortion in Iowa’s Constitution, Iowa Republicans dropped the amendment push.

Miller-Meeks has also repeated the lie that Democrats support abortion up to the due date and even after birth.

The truth is that abortions that happen late in pregnancy are often because of medical emergencies, fatal fetal abnormalities, and/or miscarriages. 

If a baby is born with serious medical issues that will result in death shortly after birth, parents usually have the option to spend those final moments with their baby in peace, rather than subject them to invasive medical procedures that would only extend the baby’s suffering. 

Miller-Meeks voted for a bill that would require doctors to provide that treatment anyway regardless of parents’ wishes because many Republicans try to frame this as a form of “post-birth” abortion.

Like Nunn, she voted for other legislation that would restrict abortion, including:

• Prohibiting the Secretary of Defense from reimbursing military members and their families for abortions.
• Promoting government funding for crisis pregnancy centers (also known as anti-abortion centers, non-medical clinics that threaten and lie to pregnant people to make them keep their pregnancies)

Miller-Meeks has touted her support for IVF, even though she didn’t vote for the Access to Family Building Act, which provides a right to access to reproductive technology like IVF.

Miller-Meeks called her opponent, Democrat Christina Bohannan, radical and extreme.

Christina Bohannan, Democratic opponent

Bohannan, a former member of the Iowa House, supports making Roe v. Wade federal law. 

Before it was overturned by the US Supreme Court, Roe declared that people have a fundamental right to privacy, and those rights are violated by restrictive abortion bans. The ruling restricted abortion to around 24 weeks.

“I could never imagine my daughter growing up with fewer rights than I had, but that’s exactly what’s happening,” Bohannan said in her latest ad highlighting Miller-Meeks’ record. “…when it comes to our bodies, women should be in charge, not Washington politicians.”