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On the Ballot | Missouri Abortion Rights Explore the ongoing debate surrounding Amendment 3 and reproductive rights in Missouri.

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5 minute read

Introduction

Amendment 3 presents Missouri voters with the decision to overturn the state’s abortion ban and enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. Its inclusion in Missouri’s November ballot is a direct result of a citizen-led campaign that gathered more than 380,000 signatures. If passed, Amendment 3 would overturn Missouri’s abortion ban, allowing abortion up to the point of fetal viability.

Transcript

Dr. Iman Alsaden [Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood Great Plains]: I was a child who was told often that I wasn’t dressing the right way or acting the right way and doing what I was supposed to be doing with my body and so this work is very personal to me. That’s the fuel that keeps me going when I am burned out and tired from traveling all over and seeing patients that are quite frankly also burned out and tired because of the amount of hoops they have had to jump through. 

There were 210 prosecutions for pregnancy-related complications in our country, and 1/3 of those happened in Oklahoma. So, we are in a region of our country where the risk is quite high. Politicians will always say, “We’re never trying to prosecute pregnant people,” and that’s quite frankly not true. 

Mallory Schwarz [Executive Director at Abortion Action Missouri]: Missourians for years before the Dobb’s decision were already going to Kansas and Illinois. Even those here in Kansas City or in Saint Louis, who may have had a quick jaunt across the river, are being displaced because there are patients coming from around the country. 

We saw in Missouri the first state to deny a pregnant person, carrying a dead fetus inside her, care at multiple emergency rooms because those hospitals, those providers, were scared. 

Threatening physicians the way that this ban does, means that new providers, medical students, and residents don’t want to come to Missouri. Especially in Missouri, a state with one of the highest rates of maternal mortality and morbidity in the nation, that will have a long-term impact on our state. 

The opportunity to vote ‘Yes’ on Amendment 3 means that we can rebuild a level of abortion access that our state has never had before. It defers to physician’s judgement to determine fetal viability and it allows patients to be able to have open and honest conversations with their providers. 

Stephanie Bell [Spokesperson for Missouri Stands With Women]: All Missourians are on the same team that we want good healthcare for mothers and we want to preserve life. We have significant concerns about the initiative allowing late-term abortions up until the moment of birth, it would allow young minors to obtain abortion without parental notification and consent, and that provider immunity clause should be a very significant concern for Missourians. And, we’re encouraging all Missourians to vote ‘No’ on this initiative. 

Mallory Schwarz: Our opposition will say anything to distract from the crisis that their abortion ban has caused. It is a public health crisis. 

Emily Wales [President & CEO at Planned Parenthood Great Plains]: I think there was some term about post delivery abortions, and these are just not situations that happen, they’re not real healthcare. The nice thing is that the courts have dealt with that head on. The Court of Appeals got to shoot down particular things and say “these are not reasonable outcomes.”  

So we are going to have language that people understood, restore access as much as possible and also make that access meaningful. When we had Roe (v. Wade) in effect here, it was not substantive right. We didn’t have access, we had trap laws that were shutting down clinics and so we knew that we needed something stronger than Roe and that is what Amendment 3 will be. But, we also wanted to meet Missourians where they were and understand what language would allow providers to do the work they need to do to ensure that lifesaving care is available. Also, what words in the language make sense to Missouri’s voters. 

Woman on Megaphone: These proposed abortion initiatives fail to provide a genuine solution to the complex issue of reproductive justice. 

Justice Gatson [Reproductive Justice Advocate at Real Justice Network]: You will actually be embedding a ban to the state’s constitution because of the viability language. Those folks who need care, and they fall outside of these weeks, they won’t get it. In our constitution, we will criminalize them, we will criminalize the people who provide the care for them. This is not good. 

Bonyen Lee-Gilmore [Vice President of Communications at National Institute for Reproductive Health]: Before Roe was decided by the Supreme Court, advocates were asking for abortion rights, period. Justice Harry Blackman (Supreme Court Justice), created this concept of a viability limit to figure out a way to find a compromise between abortion rights and allowing the government to have some sort of interest in pregnancy decision making. 

Viability is vague and it can be defined and if you don’t hold the power in the state you have to think of who has the power to define when a fetus is viable. This leads to stories like Brittany Watts in Ohio who was investigate for her miscarriage and the judge cited Ohio’s viability limit as a justification to refer her case to the Grand Jury. 

We’re also talking about criminalization of pregnant people, investigations of pregnant people who are navigating pregnancy outcomes like miscarriage or stillbirth. Whenever we are introducing police into the framework, we are now talking about a heightened targeting of women of color. 

Justice Gatson: We can not follow this ‘reproductive rights’ model, because we can not trust the courts to do what’s necessary for us. We’re really just opening ourselves up to a whole bunch of harm that we really don’t have to do. We can wait, we can get the language right, and we can go for it again next year. We’re told over and over again, “we can’t wait, we can’t wait, we can’t wait.” 

We can wait for this one, it’s important to get this one right. 

Bonyen Lee-Gilmore: We have been conditioned to meet the Roe standard. Now we’re in a different time. There was pretty groundbreaking research conducted by PerryUndem where they tested the Michigan abortion ballot and they tested that with the viability limit against a clean version. The clean version did double digits better. They did not trust that the government would enforce that with any sort of goodwill and they expressed a complete reduction of government interference at all at any point. But, the movement hasn’t quite caught up to that.  

We have an opportunity to rewrite these policies so that we’re centering the most marginalized people, and so the invitation to advocates across the country is really to think about whether we need to negotiate against ourselves at the gate.  

Emily Wales: I think it’s fair for Missourians to be anxious about that. The nice thing is we’ve been battling this in 5 different phases just to get on the ballot and again and again the courts have seen this amendment language and the process for what it is. We also wrote this language in a way that the legislature has to meet national clinically accepted standards like The Society for Family Planning. They set the professional expectations and definitions for this care, and we are not going into this conversation with the legislature in a naïve way. We’re going to be ready for that. 

Dr. Iman Alsaden: There’s always a disconnect between the law and medicine, which is why the viability piece is tricky. I know that there are a lot of people that have different, different opinions about it. Think about all the people that it would restore access to and I would also encourage those people to think about the fact that they are often providing care for places that already have fetal viability standards. 

Abortion affects all of us. If you don’t know somebody that has been affected by abortion, first thing, you probably do. Second thing, you will, and we should try to give people their rights back and we can continue to work around the rest for now. 

[END]

This video is part of a series of shorts focused on supporting voters at the polls this November. You can see all the videos in the series and stream additional election coverage from Kansas City PBS at kansascitypbs.org/ontheballot.

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