Iowans who handle public records requests for government bodies gained more protection from possible retaliation on June 23, when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that former Iowa Department of Public Health communications director Polly Carver-Kimm can proceed with both of her wrongful termination claims against the state.

Four justices affirmed a Polk County District Court decision, which allowed Carver-Kimm to allege under Iowa’s whistleblower statute that she was wrongly forced to resign in July 2020, and that Iowa’s open records law protected her activities when fulfilling records requests for the public health agency.

The Iowa Supreme Court did reverse one part of the lower court’s ruling. All seven justices determined that Governor Kim Reynolds and her former spokesperson Pat Garrett should be dismissed as individual defendants, because they lacked the “power to authorize or compel” Carver-Kimm’s termination.

But the impact of the majority decision in Carver-Kimm v. Reynolds extends far beyond the named defendants in one lawsuit.

Bethany Gates is a Certified Professional Midwife from Vinton (Benton County), where she lives with her husband, Judah, and their 4 daughters.

Certified Professional Midwives are midwives who practice in an out-of-hospital setting. Iowa CPMs attend home births; in other states, CPMs attend home births and births in birth centers. 

Here in Iowa, CPMs are unregulated, and the Iowa Code does not have any section addressing their practice. While this may sound like freedom in theory, the reality is that midwives face many challenges as they strive to provide quality care, because Iowa does not license the profession.

Rachel Bruns is a volunteer advocate for quality maternal health care in Iowa.

I recently recounted how it took the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) 170 days to respond to my request for information on the total births, primary cesareans, total cesareans, and vaginal births after cesareans (VBACs) at Iowa hospitals. I eventually received aggregated five-year totals (2016 through 2020) for each birthing hospital in Iowa.

The International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) of Central Iowa, where I serve as a volunteer chapter leader, has made the data available on our website. You can see it in table form below as Appendix 1. 

While I would have preferred for IDPH to provide the figures for a single year, as I requested, the compiled data still tells us a lot about the overuse of cesareans at several Iowa hospitals and the lack of VBAC access across much of the state.

Jan Flora is Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University.

On January 9, new cases of COVID-19 reached an all-time high in Iowa. Governor Kim Reynolds may have known that when she gave her Condition of the State address two days later. By barely mentioning the pandemic, she attempted to relegate it to the past.

With the Omicron variant now dominant, COVID-19 cases were modeled to peak on January 15. Coronavirus-related hospitalizations are now near 1,000, the highest point since early December 2020. Iowa faces a grave hospitalization crisis that may not ease before March.

This week, Iowa’s COVID-19 hospitalizations reached levels not seen for more than a year. Even with 100 out-of-state nurses and respiratory therapists helping to manage the workload, the state’s major medical centers are being crushed. Hospital leaders, health care workers, and public health officials in the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, and central Iowa have been begging for weeks: “We are overwhelmed.” “We’re exhausted.” “We need your help.”

Against this backdrop, Governor Kim Reynolds has not made even a token effort to encourage Iowans to slow the spread of a virus that has killed more than 8,200 of her constituents, claiming more than 100 lives each week in recent months.

As COVID-19 hospitalizations reach levels not seen in Iowa for more than a year, the state has extended a contract for 100 out-of-state nurses and respiratory therapists to alleviate staff shortages at major medical centers.

Iowa Department of Public Health spokesperson Sarah Ekstrand confirmed to Bleeding Heartland via email that the state has twice extended the six-week contract signed with Kansas company Favorite Healthcare Staffing in early December—first to run through January 28, and more recently to run through February 11.

Ekstrand added that the state recently accepted bids “to establish a statewide hospital bed transfer line. The goal is to establish a call center to help relieve pressure on hospital staff in order for them to be able to spend more time caring for ill patients.”