Time Sensitive

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.

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 pregnancy 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 statistics deal with rapes and child sexual abuse reported to law enforcement authorities. Many more victims contacted hotlines, she said.

However, hotlines succeed because of trust and confidentiality requirements. Corley says victims could contact them anonymously, not identify their abuser, and still obtain an abortion. But what, then, is the point of the requirement?

Opinions differ on whether Corley genuinely believes she is performing a service for the women of Missouri or is acting as a plant for people out there who don’t want abortions at all. I really don’t know. But her entrance on the scene is not helpful.

“It has caused an incredible amount of confusion for folks who are desperate to restore some sort of access,” says Wales, with Planned Parenthood Great Plains and its advocacy arm.

“There should be something inherently suspect about a measure that relates to abortion rights that doesn’t include abortion providers, that doesn’t include the longtime advocates and allies,” Wales adds. “Our moment here is to grow the table, and this small group of people who are pushing this effort are not including the experts in the care of the process. And it is worrisome.”

Corley’s watered-down approach has not impressed Secretary of State Ashcroft. His summaries on her petitions are nearly as obnoxious as the ones he prepared for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. So Corley is also tied up in court.

The wrenching decision ahead

As the executive director of the advocacy group Abortion Action Missouri, Mallory Schwarz is at the center of the drive to get a meaningful petition on the 2024 ballot.

“I have been trying to hold out hope,” she says. “Day to day, my prediction changes as to what I think may be possible.”

Schwarz has been involved in other petition drives in Missouri, and she understands the effort needed to collect signatures and run a campaign. Especially in a state where residents have been told for decades that abortion is evil.

“Abortion has been so stigmatized and surrounded by so much shame,” she says.

If the advocates engaged with Missourians for Constitutional Freedom can get beyond Ashcroft’s obstruction, a wrenching decision awaits. They will have to select just one of the six petitions under consideration to send into the world for signatures.

The language in the various petitions ranges from robust protection of the right to bodily autonomy with no restrictions to provisions allowing the legislature to enact regulations beginning at the 24th week of pregnancy or at the point when a physician determines a fetus to be “viable,” or able to survive outside of a mother’s womb. The petitions also offer different options regarding a ban on state funding for abortion and parental consent for minors.

To be clear, everyone at the table would love to see Missouri enshrine the right to abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with no more interference from a legislature that, over the years, has done everything in its power to harass providers and patients.

They disagree on what is possible. Abortion opposition has a powerful infrastructure in Missouri, and national groups would love to help defeat an expansion of reproductive rights here in America’s heartland.

“I think we want to be in a position where we can move the most expansive policy possible,” Schwarz says. “We also recognize that a lot of Missourians are being harmed right now by living in a state with a total ban. Part of our consideration is we need to do both things. We need to mitigate the harm right now as much as we possibly can while continuing to fight for the most expansive policy possible.”

Pamela Merritt, a longtime abortion activist who is executive director of Medical Students for Choice, sees nothing magical or essential about a 2024 ballot.

“When did that become do or die?” she asks. “My question is: Do we have the capacity and our act together enough to make this move in 2024? And if not, why would we take the risk?”

Passage of a ballot initiative would not automatically restore abortion access to Missouri, Merritt and others point out. Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, the legislature made it its mission every year to pass at least one awful law designed to close abortion clinics and intimidate providers and patients. All of those laws remain on the books. If abortion rights were enshrined in Missouri’s constitution, they would come back and would have to be invalidated in court.

Merritt, whose organization works nationally and internationally, wants her home state to adopt a strategy that will protect newly gained abortion rights from a gerrymandered legislature that will never stop trying to interfere with women’s reproductive decisions.

“We need to organize for what we need, not for what we think we can get,” she says. “Ballots are a tactic, and we need a strategy.”

No one I talked to disagrees with that point. But at some point, strategy collides with urgency.

“It is my strongest desire for it to be on the ballot as soon as possible,” says Smith, the St. Louis OB-GYN. In her practice now, she refers women facing difficult pregnancy decisions to doctors in Illinois, where laws acknowledge that abortion is a legal right. Hundreds of women in outlying areas of Missouri don’t have that luxury, she says.

“Women are so afraid at this point, so afraid that I won’t be able to take care of them, or that I’ll feel like I’ll have to save their babies and let them die,” Smith says. “The psychology of being a pregnant person in Missouri has really changed over the last year and a half.”