JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – The Missouri Supreme Court has refused to hear state Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s bid to restore several of Missouri’s abortion restrictions, ruling unanimously that he was wrong to ask the state’s highest court without bringing the matter to an appeals court first.
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.” However, abortion is never necessary for health reasons and it is always gravely unethical.
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.” Lawmakers are currently working on a new ballot initiative to undo the amendment next year.
In July, Bailey’s office filed an appeal of a Jackson County Court injunction against numerous health and safety regulations on the abortion industry, including protection against abortion coercion, ultrasound informed consent, and requirements for facility and equipment cleanliness and written protocols for emergency complications.
“These commonsense protections were put in place because of the past actions of abortion providers in Missouri: moldy equipment, falsified reports, and disregard for basic medical standards,” Bailey said at the time. “The abortion industry has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted to police itself.”
Yet the state’s highest court ruled August 12 that its intervention would be premature.
“[T]he State raises 20 points of error, ranging from questions of justiciability to improper application of the preliminary injunction standard,” Judge Mary Russell writes. “Although some of these points relied on present constitutional questions, none of them directly contend the laws enjoined are valid or constitutional, nor could they, because the circuit court has yet to rule on the constitutional validity of any of the challenged statutes. The appeal relates to only a preliminary decision, a decision made before the circuit court has ruled on the validity of the challenged statutes.”
Because the matter does not yet fall in the state Supreme Court’s exclusive purview, she explained, “this Court transfers the case to the court of appeals, where appellate jurisdiction properly lies.”
“Today’s procedural ruling is disappointing but not surprising. From the outset, this has been lawfare,” Bailey responded. “An underhanded effort by a Jackson County prosecutor, backed by the pro-abortion movement, to undermine Missouri’s duly enacted laws. This case goes beyond one county or one courtroom; it’s about the values of the entire state. This fight is bigger than one case; it’s about the safety of women, the lives of children, and Missouri values. We will not back down.”
The case highlight the danger of pro-abortion amendments, which in practice tend to go much further even than what their backers present to voters and give activists judges room to rule far more broadly than the text arguably requires.
Ballot initiatives have been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tactics. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe v. Wade 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.
