(LifeSiteNews) — Missouri pro-lifers will try again this year to pass a constitutional amendment recognizing fetal personhood and undoing a 2024 measure insulating a “right” to abortion in state law.
In November 2024, Missouri residents approved a state constitutional amendment establishing a purported “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” that applies to “all matters relating to (so-called) reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, (so-called) abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions.” It prohibits the legislature from banning abortion until “fetal viability” and after “viability” if an abortionist claims that killing a woman’s unborn child is deemed “needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.”
The amendment effectively invalidated the state’s near-total abortion ban, which only allowed abortion when allegedly necessary to avoid the mother’s death or “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”
NPR Kansas City affiliate KCUR reports that Republican state Sen. Mike Moon has reintroduced a proposal to put before voters this fall an amendment stating the “term ‘person’ under this constitution includes every human being with a unique DNA code regardless of age, including every in utero human child at every stage of biological development from the moment of conception until birth”; and that “Nothing in this constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”
“Some are saying that we are doing our best to save the children, especially the pre-born children, but I ask you this question: ‘how can we make that claim if we haven’t taken all the steps we can possibly take to make that happen?’” Moon argued “Will this committee determine that we’ve already done as much as we can do? Or will you endeavor to do even more?”
While effectively undoing the current pro-abortion amendment, the new amendment does not specifically create a new abortion ban, but by recognizing the preborn as persons under the law it could be interpreted as such.
It could also be interpreted as requiring equal protection to go even further than another proposed amendment that has been cleared to appear on the ballot, which would ban abortion except for rape and incest in the first trimester or for “medical emergencies” throughout pregnancy, along with banning taxpayer funding for abortion or youth gender “transitions.”
Twelve states ban all or most abortions, with a wide range of lesser restrictions also in effect. But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.
Ballot initiatives have been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tactics to preserve abortion “access” without Roe v. Wade. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public.
After 2020, pro-lifers either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Kansas, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.
This year, Virginia will also be voting on a pro-abortion constitutional amendment, while a potential pro-life amendment is pending in Nebraska and two more pro-abortion ones have been proposed in Idaho and Nevada.
