Iowa Supreme Court cites Professor Pruitt, Marta Vanegas '11 in abortion case

The Iowa Supreme Court, in rejecting a law requiring a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions, cited a 2015 paper by Professor Lisa Pruitt and Marta Vanegas ’11.

The court’s 5-2 decision in Planned Parenthood of the Heartland et al., v. Reynolds et al., noted that a 2017 law passed by the Iowa legislature requiring a 72-hour wait between clinic visits did not make allowances for rural women who live far from health centers, thus placing extra burden on them.

To support its argument, the court cited Pruitt’s and Vanegas’ “Urbanormativity, Spatial Privilege, and Judicial Blind Spots in Abortion Law,” which was published in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. The article asserts that state laws restricting abortion “have the greatest impact on women who live farthest from where abortion providers tend to be located,” and that “these laws appear to exact the greatest toll on women who are both rural and poor.”

Lisa R. Pruitt, Martin Luther King, Jr. professor at UC Davis School of Law, is a scholar whose recent work explores the legal relevance of rural spatiality, including how it inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity.  Pruitt's work also considers rural-urban difference in transnational and international contexts.