Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a six-week abortion ban for her state into law Friday afternoon.

“This week, in a rare and historic special session, the Iowa legislature voted for a second time to reject the inhumanity of abortion and pass the fetal heartbeat law,” Reynolds, a Republican, said ahead of signing the bill at the Family Leadership Summit to a round of applause.

She later added: “All life is precious and worthy of the protection of our laws.”

The legislation bans abortion past when fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for when the life of the mother is in danger, fetal abnormalities that would result in the baby’s death, rapes reported within 45 days, and incest reported within 140 days.

The bill passed Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this week and goes into effect immediately.

“The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed,” Reynolds said in a statement at the time.

Abortion providers have already filed a legal challenge against the ban.

The bill emphasizes that the law is “not to be construed to impose civil or criminal liability on a woman upon whom an abortion is performed in violation of the division.”

However, the bill allows Iowa’s board of medicine leeway on deciding how abortion providers who violate the law should be punished.

Iowa’s “heartbeat” bill is the latest in a string of GOP-led state laws restricting abortion after the Supreme Court in June last year overturned Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide.

Abortion is currently banned throughout pregnancy in 14 states, which have different exceptions depending on the state.

In Georgia, abortion is banned once the unborn baby’s heartbeat can be detected, which is around six weeks. Similar “heartbeat” abortion bans in Ohio and South Carolina are stuck in court, so they are not currently in effect. Florida passed a “heartbeat” ban in April that will not take effect until the Florida Supreme Court delivers a ruling on an abortion case about a separate 15-week ban Governor Ron DeSantis approved last year.

Abortion procedures differ depending on how far along the mother is in her pregnancy.

In the first trimester, a woman can often undergo a medication abortion at home, which involves taking the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol to cause the uterus to shed its lining and start cramping and bleeding, expelling the baby.

For abortions later in the pregnancy, a surgical procedure called dilation and evacuation (D&E) is often used, which involves dilating the cervix and using a suction tube and sometimes forceps to remove the baby and all other pregnancy-related tissue.

Pro-life doctors have condemned the D&E procedure as brutal to the unborn child, and pro-life groups have worked for years to raise awareness about how the procedure actually works.

The vast majority of Americans want some restrictions on abortion, even though most do not want abortion to be totally banned, new poll data show.

Only about a quarter of Americans say abortion should always be legal, according to a June poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

About 73% of people think abortion should be legal in the first six weeks of pregnancy, but that number drops to only half of Americans at 15 weeks, which is still just the beginning of the second trimester.

During a scandal, it’s never a good look when an organization’s defense can be summarized as, “We’re not corrupt, we’re incompetent!” Yet, that’s exactly where the Secret Service finds itself after concluding its cocaine investigation that yielded zero leads.

Somehow, in “the most secure building in the entire world,” with an annual budget of about $3 billion and roughly 8,000 employees, per fiscal 2023 levels, the Secret Service cannot figure out who left that baggie of booger sugar. Fingerprints are impossible to obtain for some reason and video footage is apparently inadequate. So, how it snowed in July in Washington, D.C. will remain a mystery.

At face value, if you trust the Secret Service — and more specifically the Biden administration — then the only conclusion is that they are incompetent.

Of course, the other viable explanation is that the Secret Service is covering up for somebody in the White House or somebody adjacent to the White House. That would mean that the public is being misled, to put it mildly.

What could a suspect look like?

Well — spitballing off the top of my head here — perhaps a suspect would look like the son of a high-ranking senior official in the White House, one with a habit of drug usage, leaving behind illicit items, and building a career based on staying in close proximity to his father and his public office.

And now for something totally unrelated to the previous sentence, here’s a video of Hunter Biden:

This video of Hunter Biden looking like he sniffed a bump of cocaine at the White House was taken w/in *days* of the Secret Service finding a bag of cocaine on the premises

Today the Secret Service announced there are no suspects

They think you’re stupidpic.twitter.com/Bt5hCT2ghf

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 13, 2023

By not providing a definitive answer, the White House is only allowing people to reach their own conclusions. In that case, they certainly aren’t doing suspect No. 1 in the court of public opinion any favors.

The best professional salesmen will tell you that a “no” is better than a “maybe.” All that a “maybe” really means is that the person you’re trying to sell something to thinks that you’re too nice of a guy to be turned down completely.

But in the government, when officials claim they can’t give a definitive “yes” or “no” on a certain situation, all that really means is that the government thinks you’re too stupid to figure it out for yourself. Either that or, in this instance, the White House knows it will not face any consequences for its duplicity. That would make it all even more egregious.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.