One month after Missouri approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, legislators have proposed a flurry of bills to tighten abortion access or raise the bar for future amendments driven by voter initiatives.
by Jeremy Kohler, for ProPublica
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One month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it—or at least undermine it.
One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The result would be to classify abortion as an unlawful killing.
Another proposal, aimed at repealing the abortion rights amendment, would ask voters to ban gender transition procedures for minors, tying the two issues together, despite the fact that the amendment did not address gender surgery, and gender-affirming care for transgender children is already illegal in Missouri.
Other proposed amendments include stricter abortion limits, such as restricting access to cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies, and fetal anomalies. These measures would impose additional requirements, such as mandating that rape survivors file police reports to obtain an abortion.
GOP lawmakers have also introduced a measure to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution through voter initiatives, which could make it harder to pass similar measures in the future.
