Missouri’s Struggle to Restore Abortion Access

Advocates in Michigan offered one path forward for the Missouri groups that wanted to seize the moment. Before Dobbs, they had launched a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution to assert, “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” This was an expansive reframing of the right to abortion, which the measure included within “the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.”

The proposed amendment also prevented the state from penalizing, prosecuting, or otherwise taking any “adverse action against an individual based on their actual, potential, perceived, or alleged pregnancy outcomes, including but not limited to miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion,” and protected people “aiding or assisting a pregnant individual in exercising their right to their reproductive freedom with their voluntary consent.” The Michigan reproductive freedom amendment did allow for the state to “regulate the provision of abortion care after fetal viability,” excluding instances when it would protect the life, physical, or mental health of the pregnant person, but the language had been developed before Dobbs, when viability, as enshrined in Roe, was still the standard. Some Missouri advocates wanted to be more ambitious.

On a Sunday morning in October 2022, with the November midterms just around the corner, Representative Cori Bush brought Missouri Democrats’ “Reproductive Freedom Tour” to Kansas City. The Dobbs decision had unleashed rage and energy across the country, and Democrats hoped to harness it. At the rally, Bush shared her abortion story; local elected officials spoke; and Justice Gatson, the executive director of the Reale Justice Network, announced a reproductive justice ballot initiative her group had in the works in Missouri. In addition to establishing “rights to bodily autonomy, medical privacy and equitable and accessible health care,” The Kansas City Star reported, “the ballot initiative would also protect health care for trans people and push for housing and bail initiatives.” It was expansive, and it spoke to the moment: Dems may have branded the event “Roe the Vote,” but Roe was in the rearview.