Missouri’s Historic Abortion Victory Is Crumbling Before Our Eyes

Not long after the election, the two Planned Parenthood affiliates that have health centers in Missouri challenged many of those laws as “presumptively unconstitutional,” citing Amendment 3. Their petition, filed in the circuit court of Jackson County by Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers-Missouri, also requested that the court temporarily block such laws while the case played out. That included the total abortion ban triggered after Roe, as well as laws meant to restrict abortion access even if it were not technically banned, such as mandatory waiting periods and mandatory ultrasounds. In a pair of rulings in December and February, Judge Jerri Zhang granted the affiliates’ request for a temporary injunction on most of those laws, after which Planned Parenthood clinics in Missouri began to offer abortion again, with significant limits: only procedural abortion up to 12 or 13 weeks, no medication abortion, in just three clinics across the entire state, operating at limited capacity. Other restrictions remained, including some that were not part of Planned Parenthood’s challenge. Mandatory parental involvement laws were later challenged by the practical abortion support organization Right By You, in April. There were also restrictions that Amendment 3 did not touch: The ballot measure allows for abortion to be banned past fetal viability, the legal line after which a fetus is thought to be able to survive independently. This means that people having later abortions were left out of the promises of Amendment 3 from the start.

Missouri Attorney General Bailey appealed Judge Zhang’s decision, seeking to block abortion in the state during the court challenge—an appeal enabled by a new law giving the state attorney such power to sue to halt injunctions, signed just days before. Meanwhile, the Missouri General Assembly voted to put a new abortion ban on the ballot, an effort to overturn Amendment 3. The constitutional right protecting abortion that voters believed they had succeeded in installing was being rapidly undermined across multiple fronts—by the state attorney general, in the courts, and in the legislature.

This legal undermining depends in part on voters not knowing that it’s even happening. The proposed anti-abortion ballot measure language did not refer to Amendment 3, nor to banning abortion, hiding its ban behind claims of ensuring women’s “safety during abortions.” For good measure, it added a ban on gender-affirming care for minors—care that is currently banned in the state. Democrats in the state legislature had tried to block the anti-abortion ballot measure proposal from advancing, but Republicans broke their filibuster with “a rare procedural maneuver to shut down debate and force a vote on a measure that would repeal Amendment 3,” as St. Louis Public Radio reported.