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Dec. 20, 2024 | By: Anna Spoerre - Missouri Independent
By Anna Spoerre - Missouri Independent
Weeks out from the 2025 Missouri legislative session, Republican lawmakers have already filed dozens of bills aimed at weakening or overturning Amendment 3, the voter-approved measure that legalized abortion in Missouri.
Proposals include returning to voters to ask to re-impose Missouri’s abortion ban, as well as smaller measures attempting to set parameters around Amendment 3, including by defining fetal viability.
This includes lawmaker-proposed constitutional amendments that would ask voters if they want to again ban abortion and attempts to define fetal viability around stringent parameters.
“That’s a powerful witness to the large numbers of pro-life lawmakers who have been elected and re-elected,” said Sam Lee, a longtime anti-abortion activist and lobbyist. “I’m just glad to see so many have taken the initiative to file just a variety of ideas. We’ll just see what rises to the top.”
But Lee foresees hurdles, including the threat of the Senate Democratic filibuster, which last session killed a proposed constitutional amendment seeking to make it harder to pass initiative petitions ahead of Amendment 3 landing on the ballot.
And, despite so many lawmakers naming abortion as their main priority going into the 2025 session, Lee said there is bound to be some competition with other high-profile issues in reaction to Amendment 3’s passage, including how Missouri Supreme Court judges are selected and renewed attempts to raise the threshold to pass initiative petitions.
“People outside the Capitol building find this hard to believe, but there’s relatively little time to get something passed,” Lee said. “These are all potentially lengthy battles.”
If the General Assembly is unsuccessful in pushing through a constitutional amendment that would again ban abortion during the regular session running from January to May, Lee said he and other activists are prepared to call on Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe to convene a special session later in the year.
If that doesn’t happen, Lee said the next step is a citizen-led ballot initiative aimed at overturning Amendment 3 by reinstating an abortion ban.
Incoming House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, said throughout her four-year tenure in the legislature, she’s seen Republican colleagues attempt to undo the will of the people after they approve progressive issues at the ballot box.
Aune said she’s skeptical of what the Missouri GOP will be able to accomplish this time.
“My concern would be higher if it seemed these folks had any clear plan to attack this issue,” Aune said. “ … It seems like a lot of people have a lot of different ideas, but there is not a consensus in the Republican Party about how to clearly address this. I don’t know that they’ll be able to get organized enough to get something across the finish line, but I suppose time will tell.”
In 2019, when she helped draft the trigger law that would go into effect in 2022 outlawing all abortions in Missouri with exceptions only for medical emergencies, state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican, did not include exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.
Last February, she and her Republican colleagues blocked an attempt to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s abortion ban.
Now she is among a small handful of Republican lawmakers proposing constitutional amendments that would overturn Amendment 3, but put in place abortion exceptions for survivors.
Asked why she included a rape exception this time, Coleman said “ … in these hard cases, you know, we’re going to provide a path for that, we’ll probably get a bigger percentage of support.”
She maintains that because Amendment 3 ultimately passed on tight margins — with 51.6% of the nearly 3 million votes cast — getting the support of voters to reverse it is possible.
The main question is what language and restrictions to put before voters.
“A Missourian might call themselves pro-life and feel that in the hard cases there should be an exception, but they don’t want unfettered access,” Coleman said. “Somebody might call themselves pro-choice and they are really concerned about people being able to make those decisions, but also recognize the humanity of the unborn child and don’t think you should have abortions into the second and third trimester.”
A similar constitutional amendment was also filed by state Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican. The difference is his amendment includes abortion exceptions for fetal anomalies and would only allow abortions in the cases of rape or incest during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy and only if the victim filed a police report.
Another proposed amendment, filed by incoming state Sen. Adam Schnelting, a Republican from St. Charles, would prohibit abortion but leave an exception for survivors of rape or incest prior to 12 weeks gestation and only if the crime was first reported to law enforcement at least 48 hours before the abortion.
Police reporting requirements have been widely-criticized in other states, with victim advocates calling such laws harmful to survivors.
A number of proposed amendments would also ask voters if they want to exclude gender-affirming care for minors from the definition of “reproductive freedom,” an issue that was widely-debated in the run-up to the November election.
Amendment 3 broadly legalizes abortion but allows the state legislature to restrict the procedure after the point of fetal viability, which isn’t clearly defined in the amendment but in the medical world is generally considered the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical interventions.
This is often considered as being around the halfway point in pregnancy. Abortions later than 20 weeks in pregnancy make up fewer than 1% of all abortions in the United States.
But state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Branson Republican, is attempting to define fetal viability as the point at which electrical cardiac activity is detectable, but before a fetus’s heart is formed. This usually happens by about six weeks gestation.
Seitz hopes his bill will be one of the easier approaches to legislating Amendment 3.
“The House of Representatives will be able to coalesce around the heartbeat bill, because it cannot be denied, scientifically, logically, spiritually, that once the heart has started beating, that is a living person,” he said. ”And I think that person should be protected and guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Seitz, who represents one of the more conservative Christian corners of the state, also filed a bill aimed at granting “unborn children … the same rights, powers, privileges, justice, and protections as are secured or granted by the laws of this state to any other human person.”
Similar fetal personhood bills have been filed in the form of constitutional amendments by Republican lawmakers, including state Rep. Justin Sparks of Wildwood and Rep. Burt Whaley of Clever.
Organizations like the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have warned that fetal personhood laws, which have gained momentum in recent years, could criminalize some contraceptives and restrict infertility treatments.
Seitz’s third bill, a “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” would establish first-degree murder charges for anyone who “kills a child born alive” following an attempted abortion procedure.
A number of Republican lawmakers, including Sparks and state Rep. Ann Kelley, of Lamar, filed legislation that would prohibit the use of fetal tissue for research following an elective abortion.
State Sen. Mike Moon, a Republican from Ash Grove, also filed a bill seeking to criminalize anyone in possession of or found distributing an abortifacient, including mifepristone, a medication commonly used to induce non-surgical abortions.
This is likely a nod to a growing call by Republicans across the nation for the federal government to enforce the Comstock Act, a 1873 law that bans the mailing of obscene material, including for the use of abortion even in states where it’s legal.
Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said the efforts to unravel Amendment 3 are “disheartening.”
“We’ve seen Republicans, Democrats, Independents come together to either stop abortion bans or protect reproductive rights,” she said. “So what it looks like to me is politicians that are out of touch with their constituents and really using their political power to undermine the will of the people.”
When talking about the GOP’s plans to fight Amendment 3, those on both sides of the aisle have pointed to a 2018 citizen-approved amendment that would have required legislative districts be drawn to ensure partisan fairness. This amendment, known as “Clean Missouri,” was repealed two years later through a legislature-proposed amendment.
Senate Democrats do have one major tool in their pocket: the filibuster.
“Me and my Democratic colleagues in the Senate are going to do everything we can to uphold the will of the people and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to protect reproductive rights,” said state Sen. Tracy McCreery, an Olivette Democrat. “But we also are not miracle workers.”
McCreery said while Senate Democrats still plan to use the filibuster to kill any abortion bills, she also called on voters who supported Amendment 3 to reach out to their elected officials about their continued support of abortion.
“For a long time, Republican politicians have used abortion and reproductive health care to divide voters and to divide the electorate,” she said. “We need the public to understand that some of these (constitutional amendments) and bills that have been filed, these are serious attacks on their will and on their vote.”
Looming over every conversation around abortion legislation is a pending court case in Jackson County that will determine how quickly Planned Parenthood clinics can restart the procedure.
Missouri’s Amendment 3 legalizing abortion went into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 6, but Planned Parenthood officials said they cannot begin offering abortions again until a judge strikes down decades’ worth of restrictive targeted regulations on abortion providers, or TRAP laws, including a 72-hour waiting period between an initial appointment and the abortion procedure; requirements that abortion clinics must have admitting privileges at a hospital roughly 15 minutes away; and a requirement that the same physician who initially saw the patient also perform the abortion.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office, a defendant in the case, has argued the TRAP laws are necessary to protect women.
The lawsuit, filed the day after the election by the states Planned Parenthoods and the ACLU of Missouri, asks the court for a preliminary injunction. While the plaintiffs hoped for a quick ruling, court challenges can take months, if not years.
In the meantime, Missourians seeking abortions continue having to look out-of-state to access the procedure.
A spokeswoman with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has said the department continues to view the state’s TRAP laws as constitutional but declined to comment on specific aspects of the lawsuit as the litigation is ongoing.
“Our regulations remain in place,” Sami Jo Freeman, spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement following the court hearing. “We believe those regulations are not overly burdensome and establish necessary safety standards for these procedures. We cannot comment on pending litigation at this time.”
Lee, the anti-abortion lobbyist, said he’s pleased by how long the judge is taking to deliberate the case.
In the meantime, he plans to continue advocating for legislation that makes pregnancy and parenthood easier for families, including availability of housing, transportation and child care.
The latter — a package of tax credits that would increase access to affordable child care — remains one of the top priorities of lawmakers across the aisle headed into the 2025 session after the legislation was blocked two years in a row.
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