Just 45 days: if Republicans have their way, that’s how much time a woman in Iowa will have to report being raped if she wants to obtain an abortion.
To put it in perspective, that’s one missed period – assuming a woman’s cycles are regular and that she’s even paying attention, given she was just sexually assaulted a few weeks previous. If a woman who has been raped doesn’t report the attack within that small sliver of time, the state will not allow her end the pregnancy.
Iowa’s new anti-choice bill – which bans abortion if there is a fetal heartbeat, something that happens just five or six weeks into pregnancy – has mostly been covered because the unconstitutional legislation, if passed, would be a direct threat to Roe v Wade. (That’s what the bill’s architects had in mind.)
But what has gone largely under the radar is that the bill’s supposed exceptions for rape and incest are so radically restrictive that they would make it near impossible for sexual assault assault victims to end their pregnancies. Which, of course, is the point.
Republicans know that two out of three rape victims do not report their assault to the police. They also know that incest victims – who have 140 days to report being assaulted under the bill – often don’t disclose their abuse even to family doctors because medical professionals are mandated to report the crime to authorities. (Children are often fearful to tell anyone about incest because of the reasonable fear that they’ll be placed in foster care or that their relative will get in trouble.)
Women’s hesitancy to report comes with good reason – even today, police departments and healthcare professionals frequently mishandle cases, victim-blame, and further traumatize victims. But bills like the one in Iowa are not about protecting women or doing what’s best for them; they’re about forcing girls and women to carry pregnancies whether they want to or not.
There’s also something particularly troubling about forcing women to “prove” their abuse before the state allows them to have a medical procedure. When I first read about the bill, it reminded me of a scene from the dystopian Hulu drama, The Handmaid’s Tale, where June’s husband needs to sign document a giving her “permission” to get birth control.
We’re already living in a country where women need to prove their worthiness for medical care via a male institution (the government), and multiple states have tried to pass bills that would mandate women to get their husband’s permission before obtaining an abortion. Last year, a bill in Arkansas would have even forced women to notify their rapist before ending the pregnancy.
The Iowa bill’s exception rules operate from much the same place that all anti-choice legislation does: that women are not to be trusted. That we lie about rape and that we can’t make decisions about our own bodies without interference from male politicians. It’s an especially interesting position to take in a moment when women across the country are demanding that their stories of sexual abuse be believed and taken seriously.
So let’s watch the Iowa bill – and other state legislation like it – because of the threat it poses to abortion rights across the board. But let’s also take notice of the incremental ways states are trying, and often succeeding, in eroding women’s rights. It’s all horrific, and it all matters.
- Jessica Valenti is a Guardian US columnist