Push for Missouri abortion ban isn't about protecting women. It's about punishing them

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Protestors with Abortion Action Missouri interrupt Missouri House debate of an anti-abortion constitutional amendment on April 15, chanting: "When abortion rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back" (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
Debate about abortion is often divorced from reality. But I was still stunned by the stream of elaborate and hurtful lies from Missouri lawmakers at the recent hearing on the bill to overturn Amendment 3.
House Joint Resolution 73 is an attempt to reinstate the abortion ban that Missouri voters rejected when we passed Amendment 3.
The bill itself, which would put the legality of abortion back on the ballot, is written to be as misleading as possible. For example, it contains a ballot summary that doesn't tell voters that it would put the ban back in effect. It instead asks voters if they want to protect treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.
But the hearing was amazing for the way Republican legislators openly infantilized and lied about Missouri voters, women and doctors.
The bill sponsor, Republican state Rep. Brian Seitz of Branson, opened with testimony tightly packed with falsehoods and paternalism: 'The preeminent facet of this legislation is that it protects women. What Amendment 3 took away from them, this legislation seeks to restore.'
The implication is that I, like all women, need to be protected from my choices about my family, life and health care. I also need to be protected from the vote that I cast in November to take away the state's authority to make those decisions for me. This is because I, like the majority of Missouri voters, lack the intelligence to have understood what I was voting for on a widely and fiercely debated issue.
This theme of 'protecting' women is also about justifying medically inappropriate abortion regulations. These regulations are sold as health protections but are actually intended to be impossible to comply with, so that abortion clinics can't operate. These are 'targeted regulation of abortion providers,' or 'TRAP' laws.
Amendment 3 forecloses that backdoor ban strategy by putting the burden on the state to prove that a regulation actually has a health benefit. Amendment 3 also bars discrimination against abortion care. It's easy to tell when a law discriminates against abortion care by looking at whether the same regulations apply to miscarriage care, because abortion involves the same procedures and medications.
Seitz went on to make the particularly fanciful claim that 'this legislation seeks to align itself with the will of the voter' because 'the people expressed that they wanted exceptions.'
We did not express that we wanted exceptions. Amendment 3 had nothing to do with and no mention of exceptions.
What voters said is that we don't want abortion to be banned in Missouri anymore.
The claim that what voters really wanted was for abortion to continue to be banned but with exceptions for those victims of rape and incest who can jump through all the hoops our anti-exceptions legislature has in store for them is a fantastical lie.
'Incest' refers to a child raped and impregnanted by a family member.
Even House Speaker Jon Patterson of Lee's Summit (who is a doctor and was the lone Republican to vote against the bill) acknowledged that a child who is being sexually abused is not likely to realize she is pregnant by the 12 week cut off for the victim exception in HJR 73. And if this child does realize what is happening to her before 12 weeks, how is she supposed to end her pregnancy if there are no functioning abortion clinics in this state?
The hearing devolved into legislators interrogating testifying pastors about when life begins and berating doctors who testified that their patients were harmed under the ban.
State Sen. Rick Brattin, a Republican from Harrisonville, responded vehemently to a doctor recounting how the ban had caused harm to her miscarrying patients, including one who bled for four weeks after being denied a procedure to evacuate her uterus.
Brattin, like lawmakers across the country, blamed doctors for not understanding the law.
'Negligence of the law is no excuse' he said repeatedly. I'm pretty sure what he meant to say is 'ignorance of the law is no excuse,' which he illustrated with the classic example that not knowing the speed limit is not an excuse for speeding.
But I think Brattin hit on an accidental insight with 'negligence of the law is no excuse.'
Lawmakers need to own the outcomes of the laws they pass.
Doctors provide care based on what their lawyers say they can or cannot do. As ProPublica has documented in Texas, many hospital lawyers are telling doctors they can't provide miscarriage care until the patient shows signs of infection or other life threatening complications when fetal heart tones can still be detected.
Others are providing no guidance or legal support at all, leaving doctors to navigate the risk of criminal prosecution unaided. ProPublica has reported on the deaths of five women denied abortion care. Another 20 women who survived have sued Texas.
Missouri's medical emergency 'exception' language in both the now enjoined ban and HJR 73 is nearly identical to Texas' — but worse.
It required not just that a patient be at 'a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function,' but that the impairment be 'substantial and irreversible.' And the exception wasn't actually an exception. It was a defense to the crime of providing any abortion that the doctor would have the burden of proving at trial.
Missouri has fewer reported stories than Texas of women injured because we are a small state that borders states where abortion is legal. But we know it happened here, too.
When Mylissa Farmer was miscarrying she was sent to a Kansas hospital three hours away for treatment. She was turned away in Kansas where abortion is legal but heavily restricted. When she was finally able to get an abortion in Illinois, she was in excruciating pain and had an infection.
The rate of sepsis among pregnant women, which can be fatal, has increased by 50% since Texas banned abortion. There's no reason to think women here weren't similarly endangered when Missouri's ban was in effect.
And yet, Brattin yelled that the ban's emergency exception had been perfectly clear. It wasn't the law but doctors' ignorance of it that caused women who had lost their babies to bleed for weeks.
Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that lawmakers didn't intend to imperil pregnant women. Intent doesn't matter. As Brattin put it: 'negligence of the law is no excuse.'
And at this point, it's not negligence but deliberate indifference, given that injuries have been widely reported and a doctor told Brattin to his face that she had treated patients who were denied miscarriage care. The harm is known, but he and his fellow Republicans do not care.
Miscarrying women are justifiable collateral damage in their attack on the main target: women and girls who do not want to continue their pregnancies. They want the opposite of safer abortion. They want to reinstate the ban so that we have to have later, more complicated or invasive procedures after traveling out of state, or to self manage with abortion medication from the internet without local medical supervision.
They want anyone who needs an abortion to suffer as much as possible.
It's not protection, it's punishment.