Nonprofit sues to overturn Missouri's parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions
Stephanie Kraft Sheley, founder of Right By You, poses for a portrait in April 2025. Her organization is suing Missouri, arguing the state's parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions are unconstitutional (Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent).
A reproductive health care nonprofit filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to overturn Missouri's law requiring minors to get parental approval before getting an abortion.
The lawsuit contends the consent law is unconstitutional after voters passed an abortion rights amendment last year. Right By You, a nonprofit that helps young people navigate pregnancy decisions, including by increasing access to and awareness around contraceptives, prenatal care, abortion, parenting and adoption, filed the lawsuit in Jackson County Circuit Court
Missouri's parental consent law, which remains on the books, requires that a minor attempting to access abortion receive at least one parent's consent. The other parent must also be notified. If that's not possible, they can also seek out a judicial bypass process.
Right By You is also challenging Missouri's ban on aiding or assisting a minor seeking an abortion.
'The laws bully pregnant young people without parental support into giving birth and threaten legal action against and undermine the core activities of Good Samaritans who seek to help young people effectuate their own decisions about their pregnancies with dignity,' the lawsuit reads.
Missourians in November narrowly voted to enshrine the right to reproductive health care, including abortion, in the state constitution. That language, known during the election as Amendment 3, includes a provision that prohibits the government from discriminating 'against persons providing or obtaining reproductive health care or assisting another person in doing so.'
The amendment does allow the government to legislate abortion access if compelling governmental interest exists.
The current parental consent requirements and ban on assisting minors seeking an abortion 'enhance the information, guidance or support (young people) receive,' but does 'disregard, burden and punish young people's decision to end a pregnancy,' the lawsuit reads.
Abortion returns to Columbia, opening access for mid-Missouri for first time since 2018
Stephanie Kraft Sheley, founder of Right By You, said most young people do involve a parent or trusted adult in conversations about abortion. It's those who can't whom she worries most about.
'It makes sense that folks that are in healthy relationships with their children have this instinct that they would want their children to come to them, but a law that forces that to happen in every case is not the solution to that problem, because it's not possible for a law to legislate a healthy family dynamic.' she said.
The impact of the law, Kraft Sheley said, is 'not actually on the young person that you're imagining who has a good relationship with their parent, it's on a young person who's very safety and well being would be compromised by having this conversation with a parent.'
Right By You is asking the court to strike down the parental consent law and to allow the group to begin funding and arranging logistics for minors seeking abortions, including transportation, hotel and child care costs.
'Young people are shooting this really narrow gap, and then they're navigating this obstacle course that's just traumatic and harmful and doesn't provide any corresponding benefit to them,' Kraft Sheley said. 'I see it play out with a lot of confusion, a lot of turmoil, and in some cases, I see young people not able to access care.'
The state of Missouri and Attorney General Andrew Bailey are named as defendants in the lawsuit, as is the Jackson County prosecutor, who is being sued as a representative of the prosecutors across Missouri.
A separate lawsuit challenging several of Missouri's other laws regulating abortion is also playing out in Jackson County. The day after the November election, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Missouri sued the same defendants on similar grounds, arguing current targeted regulation of abortion provider laws were unconstitutional under Amendment 3.
A judge temporarily struck down most of the TRAP laws, allowing some abortions to resume in Missouri. The full trial is set for early 2026.
Meanwhile, Bailey is also suing Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which oversees clinics in Kansas City and Columbia, over allegations that the organization is transporting minors out of state for abortions.
The lawsuit is based on a video filmed more than a year ago at the Kansas City clinic. In the recording, a man secretly taped an interaction for Project Veritas in which he pretended to be the uncle of a 13-year-old in need of an abortion whose parents couldn't know.
Planned Parenthood staff then directed him to their affiliate clinics in Kansas where they said he could 'bypass' parental consent. When the man asked how often girls go out of state for abortions, the Planned Parenthood employee said it happens 'every day.'
During a court hearing on Monday in Cole County, attorneys for Planned Parenthood argued the lawsuit should be dropped on the grounds that the video was 'hypothetical' and that abortion is now legal.
'I find that the right to reproductive freedom initiative does not address the issue of parental consent,' Boone County Judge J. Hasbrouck Jacobs said Monday. 'And because of that, I'm going to deny the motion to dismiss.'
Kraft Sheley is also a co-founder of What's Next, an Amendment 3 accountability group made up of organizers and activists who previously called for a constitutional amendment to appear on the Missouri ballot with no restrictions on abortion.
Immediately after Amendment 3 was approved by voters, the coalition started calling on the state's major reproductive rights groups to challenge Missouri's parental consent law.
'They haven't done so,' Kraft Sheley said. 'And we can't sit and watch those people be left behind.'
The lawsuit also notes that current policy does not clearly state how or if minors in state custody or in the foster care system can access abortion through the current parental consent law.
A Missouri teen spent her life in foster care. Now she's fighting the state to keep her baby
The Independent recently published a story detailing the journey of a young teenager in foster care who was denied an abortion in 2024 at the age of 15. After the state said abortion wasn't an option, she spent her pregnancy and postpartum in constant fear of the state removing her baby, despite providing her with practically no resources to help her parent.
'My fear is we'll see more cases like (this one,)' which Kraft Sheley described as 'my literal fear of what will become of young people who are forced to continue pregnancies. That's what is proposed by these criminal involvement laws, and that is what this constitutional amendment explicitly disallows.'
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