Ahead of anti-abortion fervor, Planned Parenthood pushes to regain ground in Missouri

President-elect Donald Trump, who supported abortion rights until he didn’t, now says he wants to shape a U.S. Supreme Court that will unravel Roe v. Wade.

Just one more history-busting feat for Trump’s gruesome reality show. But why worry, the woman-cherishing president-elect told Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes just days after his victory. The demise of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling would simply toss the question of abortion back to state legislatures. And if someone’s state bans the procedure outright? “They’ll have to go to another state,” Trump said with a shrug, as though every woman in red America has ready access to a private jet.

Laura McQuade, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, listened to Trump’s cavalier pronouncement with more trepidation than most. Her affiliate operates family-planning clinics in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas — all heavily Republican states whose legislatures already work hard to harass abortion providers and intimidate patients.

“My first thought was, this is the United States,” McQuade told me last week. “You shouldn’t have access to your constitutional rights only in blue zip codes.”

Andrew Koenig, a Missouri representative who won election to the state Senate on November 8, doesn’t agree. “I don’t like abortion. I want it out of the state,” Koenig, a Republican from west St. Louis County, told the Associated Press recently.

When I reached Koenig on the phone, he said he liked Trump’s state-by-state idea a lot. “I think it’s potentially a great opportunity for the state of Missouri to eliminate abortion,” he said. “Maybe not this year or next year, but at some point in the future I can see that happening.”

It would be nice to dismiss Koenig’s talk as bluster. But Missouri’s incoming attorney general, Josh Hawley, calls abortion “a violent act against the defenseless” and wants it banned altogether. And while Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon didn’t exactly stick his neck out to support abortion providers and patients, his GOP successor, Eric Greitens, is likely to be aggressively hostile.

“This is potentially the worst situation for access to reproductive health care, and for health care access across the board, that Missouri has ever seen,” McQuade told me.

But that’s the long-term prognosis. The immediate prospects for expanding access to abortion in Missouri are actually quite promising.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Texas laws that required abortion clinics to meet hospital-like standards and their doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The laws are medically unnecessary and create unconstitutional obstacles for clinics and patients, the court majority ruled.

Missouri has laws nearly identical to the Texas statutes that were found unconstitutional. Their effect has been to shut down all of the state’s abortion clinics except one in St. Louis. Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region filed a lawsuit November 30 asking a federal court to overturn those laws.

On Monday, the two affiliates upped the ante: They asked a judge to suspend the state regulations while the case works its way through the legal process. If U.S. District Judge Howard Sachs grants the injunction, abortion services in Kansas City and Columbia could resume within a week, and services in Joplin and Springfield could begin in about a month, officials said.

If the stakes weren’t so high, it would be entertaining to think of the conniptions the expansion of abortion services in Missouri would cause in the offices of Hawley, Koenig, et al. But the obstacles for women confronted with unplanned pregnancies in Missouri are a serious matter. And the backlash would likely make Kurt’s kangaroo court — the witch hunt that outgoing GOP senator and failed attorney general candidate Kurt Schaefer launched against Planned Parenthood — look like a garden party.

In a news conference on Monday, McQuade described the threats to abortion in Missouri as “a critical situation.” The absence of options in most parts of the state endangers women’s health and safety, she said. 

Even as McQuade spoke, joined by Mary Kogut, executive director of the St. Louis clinic, anti-abortion groups were making plans to protest outside clinics around Missouri.

So Planned Parenthood has a fight on its hands. But that’s nothing new.

Said McQuade: “We will do everything we can to proactively and reactively protect access to our services throughout the state.”•