Missouri GOP using incest victims, miscarrying women as bait to re-ban abortion

Most Missourians, like most Americans, do not want abortion to be a crime.

This is a problem for Missouri Republicans, who demonstrated last legislative session that their top priority is not the business of the state and attending to Missourians’ needs, but the reinstatement of the abortion ban that voters just rejected.

Because they know their constituents do not want the ban back in place, they have united on a strategy of deception. They hope to tell voters that the ballot measure would protect abortion rather than recriminalize it.

This is not a new strategy. Missouri Republicans regularly seek to thwart the people’s constitutional right to enact or reject laws via citizen-led ballot measures by mischaracterizing what those measures will do. This leads to extensive and wasteful litigation when advocates are forced to sue to get accurate ballot summaries.

Though it’s not new, it is a new level of egregiousness — they are using rape victims, incest victims and women in medical distress as bait. If they are not stopped by the court of appeals, the ballot summary will tell voters the measure would protect abortion access for these individuals when it would actually take it away.

The summary, written by lawmakers and tweaked by Secretary of State Denny Hoskins on the order of a circuit court judge, asks voters if they want to “amend the Missouri Constitution to:

•         Guarantee women’s medical care for emergencies, ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages;
•       Ensure women’s safety during abortions;
•       Ensure parental consent for minors;
•       Repeal Article I, section 36, approved in 2024; allow abortions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, rape, and incest; and
•       Prohibit sex-change procedures for children?”

Almost no one knows what Article I, section 36 of the Missouri Constitution is. That term is used rather than the name of the amendment — The Reproductive Freedom Initiative — in order to hide from voters that the measure would repeal what we just approved. It would reinstate the ban, but add extremely limited and unworkable exceptions.

Under current law, victims of rape and incest already have a right to abortion because everyone does. This measure would limit that right to 12 weeks gestation. Victims of incest are typically children. When children are impregnated by their abusers, they often do not realize they are pregnant until after 12 weeks gestation. The measure would force children to carry to term. Lying to voters about what a law will do to abused children is an unconscionable perversion of democracy.

Exceptions do not work in practice. And Republican legislators do not want them to. That is why the original ban didn’t have any exceptions for rape and incest. The measure leaves the legislature free to enact insurmountable obstacles in order to accomplish what they originally legislated  — rape victims being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term like everyone else.

The claim to be protecting abortion access in the case of ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages is both an attempt to mislead voters into thinking they are protecting the rights of pregnant women in medical crisis, and an attempt to answer for the harm women miscarrying in Missouri experienced when abortion was banned.

Missouri’s anti-abortion legislators have consistently denied any responsibility for the documented harm that miscarrying women experienced when the ban was in place. The felony ban that the measure would reinstate imposes criminal liability for doctors should they violate it — and what constitutes a violation is nebulous. Laws like this force doctors to prioritize avoiding legal risk over the health of the patient, predictably leading to doctors and hospital attorneys denying or delaying care to miscarrying patients.

The carve-out for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies is an acknowledgement that harm did occur, but it does not solve the problem. It would repeal the Reproductive Freedom Initiative’s protection for the “good faith judgment” of doctors. It instead uses a “reasonable medical judgment” standard that courts have acknowledged imperils patients. The “reasonable medical judgment” standard puts doctors at risk of having their emergency medical decisions second-guessed by prosecutors and prosecution witnesses. It is a recipe for hospital attorneys refusing doctors permission to treat patients in medical distress.

The rest of the summary is equally misleading. “Ensure women’s safety during abortions” misleadingly implies there would be legal abortions to have, as does “ensure parental consent.” What is there to consent to if your daughter cannot have a legal abortion?

“Prohibit sex-change procedures for children” implies that gender affirming care is currently legal for children, which it is not. And children with gender dysphoria weren’t having “procedures” when it was legal. It’s another use of children as bait.

The measure is an abortion ban.

The idea that the summary is a good faith attempt to communicate to voters what the law would do doesn’t pass the laugh test. This sort of gamesmanship is an attack on the democratic process that makes a joke of our court system.

It is not the job of the legislature or the secretary of state to see how much the courts will let them get away with. Their job is to serve Missourians by carrying out their constitutional duties.

Missouri voters are not enemies to be tricked and defeated, we are citizens with rights that our elected officials have sworn to uphold.

Disclosure: Bridgette Dunlap contributed to an amicus brief in this case.

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