Missouri’s New Fight to Roll Back Abortion Age Restrictions

The group bringing the legal challenge, Right By You, is a free abortion-support text line that aims to be, for young people, “basically in their pocket as a resource,” executive director Stephanie Kraft Sheley told me by phone this week. “A young person is free to text us throughout their entire experience.” Sometimes, the text line might be that young person’s only support. But Right By You is barred from providing funding for abortion and related costs. The group is prohibited from paying for or coordinating the travel, lodging, or childcare that abortion seekers might need in order to access care.

Under Missouri’s ban on helping minors obtain an abortion, a group like Right By You risks onerous fines, or being legally compelled to shut down by the state attorney general. Under the state’s mandated parental involvement law, it could also be subject to criminal liability, according to the group’s lawsuit, if it helps a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent. That law requires young people seeking an abortion to obtain consent from one parent or legal guardian, as well as notification from another, requirements that in practice prevent “some young people from even seeking an abortion,” the legal challenge states.

As volunteers at the text line regularly confront whenexplaining the laws to young people, the parental involvement law might result in delaying an abortion, which would in turn, because of the state’s gestational ban, limit the abortion seeker’s options for where they can get care and add “medical risks, added expenses, and stress,” according to the complaint. And because the parental involvement law requires either parental consent or an exception granted by a judge, “it coerces some young people to divulge intimate information to strangers because they are seeking abortion.” Together, these laws can put young people in even more precarious situations. What if a young person doesn’t have a trusted parent or guardian and needs to go to a state with less restrictive laws for an abortion? Anyone who helps them do so could run afoul of the abortion support ban too.