POLITICS
Time Sensitive MISSOURI ABORTION PETITION EFFORTS REMAIN IN LIMBO By Barb Shelly The evening of November 7 was beautiful in Ohio. As polls closed and votes rolled in, it became apparent that reasonable access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care would be enshrined in that state’s constitution. Supporters crowded into hotel ballrooms and bars and clubs to cheer and laugh and weep for joy. Moms brought their children along. The vote was nowhere close; Ohioans stood up for bodily autonomy by a 13% margin. An affirmation like that, in a state that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, ought to be good news for Missouri. Like Ohio, Missouri steadily eroded abortion rights before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Republican officials used the decision to ban the procedure almost entirely. Also, like Ohio, Missouri has a process whereby citizens can turn to direct democracy to counteract the obstinance and worst instincts of their elected officials. Attempts are underway to put an initiative petition restoring reproductive rights in front of the state’s voters in 2024. But when I talked to people invested in those efforts, I found them happy for the women of Ohio but not especially buoyed about the immediate prospects here. “I think 2024 is going to be a huge lift,” says Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, the advocacy arm for Planned Parenthood Great Plains. That is not the voice of pessimism. Wales was in the thick of the August 2022 campaign to stop the Kansas Legislature from stripping the right to abortion from the state’s constitution. She knows that abortion rights are winning with voters. But you have to get to the voters. In Missouri, that’s been like trying to wade through freshly poured concrete. You only have so much time before the concrete hardens, and you’re stuck. A coalition of women’s health providers, civil liberties champions, and progressive groups has united in support of ballot measures filed by a political action committee called Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. The PAC initially filed 11 petitions, all restoring abortion rights but differing in some details. That number has been whittled down to six. Ideally, supporters would have settled on one petition by now and be hard at work collecting the 170,000-plus valid signatures of registered Missouri voters required to meet a May deadline.
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But as winter approaches with cold days, dark evenings, and fewer people gathering at community events, efforts remain in an excruciating limbo. The holdup speaks volumes about extremism in the highest offices of the Missouri government. Jay Ashcroft, the secretary of state and a candidate for governor next year, has written outlandish ballot titles shamelessly crafted to keep the petitions in court and out of the hands of signature collectors. In one bit of good news, Ashcroft recently told reporters that, should he become governor, he would “have to quit” if reproductive rights were enshrined in the state constitution and he was asked to defend them. So, at least there’s that possibility to look forward to. Andrew Bailey, the appointed state attorney general who is running to be elected to the seat in 2024, has a very limited official role in the initiative petition process. Nevertheless, he dived in with a brazen attempt to override the elected state auditor’s estimate of how a constitutional amendment would affect Missouri’s finances. The auditor said passage would not cost or save the state any money. Bailey contended it would cost millions of dollars—maybe trillions!—if one considers that “aborting unborn Missourians will have a deleterious impact on the future tax base.” Courts have slapped down the attorney general’s attempt at overreach, just as they’ve squashed Ashcroft’s summaries. But, again, the delay is the point, and democracy be damned.
‘Dangerous substitutes’ complicate the picture The resistance from elected officials, however infuriating, was expected. In 2019, Ashcroft crafted a bag of procedural tricks to thwart a public referendum after the legislature passed what was then one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation. Of course he would reach into it now. But a wrinkle that emerged in late August was a surprise. It came in the form of six new initiative petitions filed with the secretary of state’s office. They are the work of Jamie Corley, a Republican political operative who created a new nonprofit called Missouri Women and Family Research Fund. Corley has challenged Missouri’s ban on abortions except for medical emergencies to save the life of a pregnant person, calling it “draconian.” But her petitions call for a much more limited restoration of rights than the petitions filed by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. Two of them would enshrine the right to abortion only if the pregnancy were the result of rape or incest, if the fetus had fatal abnormalities, or if the health and safety of the mother were at risk. Four of the petitions would permit a person to terminate a preg-
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nancy in the first 12 weeks. Corley grew up in St. Louis and returned there in 2020 after career moves that included working in the press offices of three members of Congress, founding a political newsletter in San Francisco, and creating and selling art. I have many questions for Corley, and at her request, I sent her some of them in an email. In response, she asked if I had received my questions from “a group,” saying they were suspiciously similar to queries she had received from a reporter in St. Louis. Nope. Not unless you count the voices in my head pointing out ridiculously obvious inquiries. I asked if Corley had consulted with abortion providers in Missouri before she filed her petitions (no one I interviewed has heard from her) and how she arrived at the 12-week mark cited in some of her petitions. I wondered why all her petitions begin by stipulating that the state cannot “deny or interfere with the fundamental right to refuse to have an abortion.” And I especially wanted to know why her petitions require
that a rape must be reported to a hotline if the victim wishes to terminate the resulting pregnancy. Part of Corley’s perspective can be found in a public letter she wrote to the Missouri Healthcare Professionals for Reproductive Rights, a group of about 300 physicians and other healthcare professionals working to restore decision-making authority in women’s reproductive care to patients in consultation with their doctors. Dr. Jennifer Smith, a co-founder who is an OB-GYN in St. Louis, posted a statement calling Corley’s proposals “dangerous substitutes” for the petitions already filed by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. The proposed rape exception, Smith said, would be “nearly impossible to verify, and thus deny most victims abortion care.” Citing data from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, Smith noted that more than half of rapes go unreported. For child sexual abuse incidents, the reporting rate is estimated at 12%. In her response, Corley noted that the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s
