Iowa’s long-blocked six-week abortion ban will remain permanently enjoined after the state Supreme Court deadlocked on whether it should be revived.

Gov. Kim Reynolds had asked the court to reinstate the law, which never took effect after it was passed in 2018, in the wake of major decisions last year limiting abortion protections under the Iowa and U.S. constitutions.

In opinions released Friday, Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan Christensen and Justices Edward Mansfield and Thomas Waterman favored affirming a district court’s order blocking the law; Justices Christopher McDonald, Matthew McDermott and David May favored reversing the district court.

The 3-3 split — Justice Dana Oxley was recused from the case — means the district court’s order is affirmed and that the law will remain permanently blocked.

Waterman, in the opinion joined by Christensen and Mansfield, wrote that it would be “legislating from the bench” to allow the law to go into effect.

“The State … now asks our court to do something that has never happened in Iowa history: to simultaneously bypass the legislature and change the law… and then to dissolve an injunction to put a statute into effect for the first time in the same case in which that very enactment was declared unconstitutional years earlier,” Waterman wrote.

McDonald, in the opinion joined by McDermott and May, argued that the abortion ban should be allowed to take effect, as the injunction was based upon court decisions that have since been overturned.

“When a case adjudging a statute unconstitutional is overruled, the statute becomes operative without reenactment. This has been ‘well settled’ law in this state for more than a century,” he wrote. “There is no ‘legal uncertainty’ under Iowa law; there is only my colleagues’ refusal to apply ‘well settled’ Iowa law.”