Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell (D-Ames) did not hide her feelings about a bill that addressed the nonconsensual cause of death or serious injury of an unborn person.
“There’s not any political compromise going into this bill as far as I can tell and it is extreme if there was ever an extreme bill,” Wessel-Kroeschell said. “It does introduce personhood into the Iowa code.”
Wessel-Kroeschell shared concerns about IVF under this proposed legislation.
“I’ve read a lot about IVF and when the news reports come out that there were all those embryos that were destroyed accidentally, I don’t know who the criminal would be in that case, but there would be a criminal according to this bill as far as I can tell,” Wessel-Kroeschell said. “This makes the pregnancy much more valuable than a newborn child, or a grandma.
“It saddens me that we have gone so far that we can’t talk and we can’t come together on reasonable language as we currently have in code.”
Wessel-Kroeschell said that, according to the fiscal note, there were no convictions under Iowa code in 2018 regarding instances the bill would address. In the last 10 years, there have only been four.
“So this is not like, some sort of tragedy that we are trying to, something that’s going on all over the place. It’s not something that absolutely needs to be addressed. We are spending our time on something we don’t need to spend our time on. I am sorry that we are doing this.”
