On Wednesday, a Jackson County judge will hear Planned Parenthood’s attempt to overturn a number of laws regulating abortion. Meanwhile, several legislators have already filed bills hoping to reinstate an abortion ban
BY: ANNA SPOERRE
Missouri Independent
On the eve of a Wednesday hearing seeking to strike down most Missouri abortion restrictions, GOP lawmakers and anti-abortion activists assembled outside five Planned Parenthood clinics around the state to call on the courts to leave abortion regulations in place.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers have begun filing some of their first pieces of legislation aimed at weakening or overturning Amendment 3, which was narrowly approved by voters last month and enshrines the right to reproductive health care in the state constitution.
The constitutional amendment, which received 51.6% of the nearly 3 million votes cast, goes into effect Thursday. It prohibits the legislature from regulating abortion prior to the point of fetal viability — generally seen as the point at which a fetus can likely survive outside the womb without extraordinary measures.
Already, at least 11 lawmaker-proposed amendments have been prefiled seeking to reverse Amendment 3 through another vote of the people.
One such bill, filed by Republican state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman of Arnold, would ask voters to ban gender-affirming surgeries for minors and all abortions with exceptions for medical emergencies and rape.
“Missouri families deserve clarity and compassion in our laws when it comes to protecting
women and safeguarding innocent life like our children from danger,” Coleman said in a statement Tuesday. “These constitutional amendments align with the beliefs of the majority of Missourians when it comes to supporting the dignity and value of all life.”
State Rep. Justin Sparks, a Wildwood Republican, is proposing his own version of a repeal amendment. He said he was inspired to take action by Amendment 3’s close margin of victory.
Sparks’ proposed constitutional amendment would define a “person” as “every human being with a unique DNA code regardless of age, including every in utero human child at every stage of biological development from the moment of conception until birth.”
State Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican, filed a proposed amendment similar to Coleman’s, but one that also included abortion exceptions for fetal anomalies. It would limit abortions in the cases of rape or incest to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy and only if the victim filed a police report.
Such requirements have been widely-criticized in other states, with victim advocates calling such reporting requirements harmful to survivors.
But on Tuesday, standing outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas City with other anti-abortion activists, Brattin said his immediate focus was appealing to the courts to uphold the state’s current “targeted regulation of abortion providers” laws, which previously made it all but impossible for doctors to provide abortions in Missouri.
The laws, enacted over the last several years by the legislature, include a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between the initial appointment and a surgical abortion, mandatory pelvic exams for medication abortions and requirements that providers report all abortions to the state.
“That’s going to be first and foremost, making sure that if they’re operating, they’re operating at the highest level of standard of care,” Brattin said.
Less than 24 hours after Amendment 3 was approved by voters, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers announced a lawsuit seeking to strike down several of these TRAP laws.
The first hearing in the case is set to take place Wednesday afternoon in Jackson County.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s office filed a motion requesting the proceedings be moved to Cole County. Earlier this year, a Cole County judge struck Amendment 3 from the ballot, a decision that was quickly overridden by the Missouri Court of Appeals.
Planned Parenthood leadership has said they hope a quick decision from the judge will allow them to start performing abortions at three health centers across the state — Columbia, the Central West End in St. Louis and the Midtown neighborhood of Kansas City — as soon as the new amendment goes into effect.
“Abortion is safe and a very common healthcare procedure,” Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, which operates the St. Louis clinics, said in a statement Tuesday. “We know that Missourians across the political spectrum support access to this life-saving care, but anti-abortion extremists are again resorting to false, tired, and previously litigated scare tactics, trying to subvert the will of the people and keep abortion banned.”
A 2018 study by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that abortion complications are rare, and complications during childbirth remain more common.
Outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis’ Central West End, Brian Westbrook, executive director of Coalition Life, called for the TRAP laws to remain in place “to make sure that women do not go into a place like this and leave in an ambulance headed to the hospital.”
“We stand here today with real, clear evidence that Planned Parenthood is not safe for women and requires serious oversight and inspections, not immunity,” he said.
Westbrook also referenced a 2018 health inspection report that determined equipment in the Columbia clinic included tubing that contained “black mold and bodily fluid.” Planned Parenthood officials later said the equipment had been replaced and the issue resolved.
The Columbia health center ended the procedure in fall 2018 when it could no longer meet a state requirement that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital no more than 15 minutes from the clinic and the clinic’s license expired. After that, until the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, only one Planned Parenthood clinic in Missouri, located in St. Louis, continued to perform abortions.
The St. Louis clinic temporarily lost its licensure as well until May 2020, when then-Missouri Administrative Hearing Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi ruled that the state health department had to re-issue the license.
“Planned Parenthood has demonstrated that it provides safe and legal abortion care,” Dandamudi’s ruling concluded. “In over 4,000 abortions provided since 2018, the Department has only identified two causes to deny its license.”
Westbrook ended Tuesday’s press conference saying he is hopeful the Trump administration will enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans the mailing of obscene material, including medications used for abortion.
He also said he supports Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s efforts to hold Planned Parenthood accountable.
The Missouri Attorney General’s office recently posed a court challenge to the Planned Parenthood suit. The latest lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Cole County, questions Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ ability to sue, claiming a 2010 settlement agreement prevents them from doing so.
Bailey, in a recent official opinion from his office, argued that while Missouri statutes prohibiting abortion prior to fetal viability will no longer be enforceable in their entirety, the state can still enforce other laws on the books related to abortion.
“In a contest where the ‘yes’ side was able in effect to rewrite the ballot summary language, received tens of millions of dollars in funding from out of state, and outspent the ‘no’ side 6 to 0,” Bailey wrote, “This tight margin suggests the result may be very different if a future constitutional amendment is put up for a vote.”