Missouri's ‘born alive' legislation is not what you think. It's worse
The Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City (Tessa Weinberg/Missouri Independent).
Missouri legislators are once again pushing what they refer to as 'Born Alive Survivors Act,' a bill that feeds off myths and miseducation about abortion in order to punish people navigating a tragic fetal diagnosis.
It targets a specific circumstance in a pregnancy involving the diagnosis of a fetus as 'incompatible with life — three horrific words families never want to hear from specialists.
If the bill passes, the law would target an even more specific subset of people who face this heartbreaking scenario — those who choose to induce labor before their due date to end their pregnancies and say goodbye to their baby under neonatal hospice care in order to begin the process of healing and grieving.
These bills deprive families of a birth plan for dying that would allow them privacy and comfort care in the last precious moments of their baby's life instead of fruitless interventions they do not want. For some patients, this course of care, sometimes called therapeutic induction of early labor, allows them to close an unthinkably difficult chapter on their own terms.
Supporters of 'born alive' legislation want to ban comfort care in these circumstances and instead force aggressive interventions with no evidence that they would sustain life.
While ending a pregnancy that is incompatible with life falls under the technical definition of abortion, it might not be the kind of abortion story we're accustomed to hearing about.
Take for example the experience of Chrissy Tiegen, who first described her loss as 'a miscarriage' at 20 weeks of pregnancy. Later, she realized she had had an abortion in the medical and legal sense because providers induced with medication. Her doctors knew her pregnancy was non-viable, and her own health was quickly failing.
Abortion was life-saving and her initial confusion over terminology is common and frankly wouldn't matter if anti-abortion politicians weren't twisting situations like hers for political gain.
What anti-abortion politicians want you to believe in their 'born-alive' rhetoric is that they're addressing something that does not happen in modern day abortion care — accidental failed abortions that result in live births.
In truth, they want people to stay pregnant on the government's timeline, even as their pregnancies grow riskier to their health. Those who choose to stay pregnant will be left unpunished under this proposed law. Those who end their nonviable pregnancies with safe medical intervention will be separated from their newborn and providers will be forced to apply aggressive, futile medical interventions.
These bills were never about concern for a baby's life. If they were, they would not apply punishment to one set of families who face the same tragic outcomes as others. It's about punishing people for exercising their bodily autonomy. It's about politicians wrestling for control over our bodies. It's about placing ideologically driven timelines on pregnancy.
When you hear about 'born-alive' bills, don't take the bait.
This isn't about abortion or life. It's about the government's obsession with punishment and control over pregnant people. Our steadily increasing maternal mortality rates tell the real story. And it's about the hypocrisy and cruelty of anti-abortion policies and the people who uphold them.
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Civil rights law firm sues to block Missouri from taking over St. Louis police
A St. Louis Metro Police car outside Carnahan Courthouse in downtown St. Louis (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent). A St. Louis civil rights law firm filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the state takeover of the St. Louis police as unconstitutional. ArchCity Defenders filed the lawsuit in Cole County circuit court on behalf of two St. Louis city residents, Jamala Rogers and Mike Milton. The state and Attorney General Andrew Bailey are the defendants. The lawsuit seeks to overturn provisions of a bill Gov. Mike Kehoe signed into law in March, which put the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department under a state board instead of local control. The law, reversing a statewide vote from 2012 that put the board under local control, was needed, supporters said, to address high crime rates. With Kehoe's signature, St. Louis joined Kansas City as the only major metropolitan police force in the country under control of a state board rather than local officials. The plaintiffs argue the law violates two parts of the state constitution: the prohibition on unfunded state mandates and on special laws targeting a particular locality. The law will 'subject the city to an unfunded mandate that diverts resources away from needed programs to prevent crime, overturns the democratic vote of the people with no rational basis to believe it will help increase public safety,' the lawsuit states, 'and will derail any progress that has been made in reducing the level of violence and improving law enforcement community relations.' The bill established a floor for the police budget in St. Louis, setting a minimum portion of general revenue funds that must be used for police each year, rising to 25% in 2028. Previously, there was no minimum funding requirement for the St. Louis city police, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit argues the city will need to either reallocate money from other programs and services or raise taxes. 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The House refused to pass a bill with $235 million of the same projects and $282 million of additional spending during the session. House Republican leaders waited for the Senate to adjourn on the last day for passing appropriations before revealing that the bill would be spiked. 'We should not be doing anything until (the spending bill is passed) and over the House, and then the House has to have it on its way to the governor before we should be taking any action on anything else,' McCreery said. The stadium funding plan would allocate state taxes collected from economic activity at Arrowhead and Kauffman to bond payments for renovations at Arrowhead and a new stadium for the Royals in Jackson or Clay counties. The cost is estimated at close to $1.5 billion over 30 years. State Sen. 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Just a few months ago, Missouri voters approved a ballot measure to protect abortion rights. That measure, known as Amendment 3, added a 'reproductive freedom' amendment to the state constitution. It was crafted to offer stronger legal protections for abortion than existed under Roe v. Wade, according to campaigners, and to end the state's near-total abortion ban, which had been triggered by the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn Roe. Those who voted for it believed that the amendment would allow them to override such past anti-abortion court rulings and to block anti-abortion lawmakers' future efforts—in essence, to reclaim their own rights and political voice. But as of May 27, by way of a two-page order from the state's Supreme Court, the abortion ban voters had been told they defeated was back. The ruling came as a 'surprise' to pro-choice and anti-abortion groups alike, the Missouri Independent reported this week. With it, the Supreme Court of Missouri has effectively allowed the state to enforce a raft of anti-abortion laws that had been challenged by two Planned Parenthood affiliates, which argued that such laws now violated the state constitution, thanks to Amendment 3. After last week's ruling, Planned Parenthood health centers in the state—Missouri's only abortion clinics—canceled upcoming appointments and advised patients that they could instead go to neighboring Kansas or Illinois, where abortion is legal. For now, those patients, and any Missourian who needs an abortion, have found themselves right back where they would have been had Amendment 3 never been on the ballot. The sudden loss of abortion access is an inarguable blow for Missouri's reproductive rights movement. But it's also something more troubling: a sign of flaws in the post-Roe strategy chosen by large national reproductive rights groups like Planned Parenthood and state chapters and affiliates of such groups, including the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL). For these groups, abortion rights ballot measures have been seen as a path forward in a hostile legal environment, a way to restore access without relying on the courts. Campaigns would go direct to the people, giving energized supporters a tangible goal to work toward, along with some optimism, amid an otherwise crushing assault on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy. The speed with which Missouri's ballot measure has gone from being a historic victory to yet another legal battle reveals that such election night wins may prove to be far more qualified and complicated to hold onto than campaigners had hoped. For some advocates in Missouri who had worked on Amendment 3, however, there was nothing all that surprising in the state Supreme Court's ruling. They saw it as a reality check. 'There is no way to responsibly sugarcoat what's playing out in the state,' the What's Next for Missouri coalition told me in a statement from the group. The coalition was founded by longtime Missouri reproductive justice advocates, as well as former staff of Planned Parenthood affiliates in Missouri who quit over their concerns about the ballot measure. 'Amendment 3 was a limited and symbolic win,' the coalition said. 'In reality, it has failed to protect pregnant people's bodily autonomy. Inaccessible abortion is just the tip of the iceberg.' Voters in Missouri may have declared that abortion was their constitutional right, but abortion was not going to return overnight to Missouri. In November, state Attorney General Andrew Bailey offered his legal opinion on which anti-abortion laws might still be enforceable. After stating that Amendment 3 'just barely' won by a 'tight margin,' he opined that 'the result may be very different if a future constitutional amendment is put up for a vote,' and detailed circumstances in which he believed some of the laws could still be enforced. In other words, he was not going to accept that Amendment 3 automatically invalidated state anti-abortion laws—and to be fair, the Amendment 3 campaign seems to have anticipated just such a reaction. Not long after the election, the two Planned Parenthood affiliates that have health centers in Missouri challenged many of those laws as 'presumptively unconstitutional,' citing Amendment 3. Their petition, filed in the circuit court of Jackson County by Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers-Missouri, also requested that the court temporarily block such laws while the case played out. That included the total abortion ban triggered after Roe, as well as laws meant to restrict abortion access even if it were not technically banned, such as mandatory waiting periods and mandatory ultrasounds. In a pair of rulings in December and February, Judge Jerri Zhang granted the affiliates' request for a temporary injunction on most of those laws, after which Planned Parenthood clinics in Missouri began to offer abortion again, with significant limits: only procedural abortion up to 12 or 13 weeks, no medication abortion, in just three clinics across the entire state, operating at limited capacity. Other restrictions remained, including some that were not part of Planned Parenthood's challenge. Mandatory parental involvement laws were later challenged by the practical abortion support organization Right By You, in April. There were also restrictions that Amendment 3 did not touch: The ballot measure allows for abortion to be banned past fetal viability, the legal line after which a fetus is thought to be able to survive independently. This means that people having later abortions were left out of the promises of Amendment 3 from the start. Missouri Attorney General Bailey appealed Judge Zhang's decision, seeking to block abortion in the state during the court challenge—an appeal enabled by a new law giving the state attorney such power to sue to halt injunctions, signed just days before. Meanwhile, the Missouri General Assembly voted to put a new abortion ban on the ballot, an effort to overturn Amendment 3. The constitutional right protecting abortion that voters believed they had succeeded in installing was being rapidly undermined across multiple fronts—by the state attorney general, in the courts, and in the legislature. This legal undermining depends in part on voters not knowing that it's even happening. The proposed anti-abortion ballot measure language did not refer to Amendment 3, nor to banning abortion, hiding its ban behind claims of ensuring women's 'safety during abortions.' For good measure, it added a ban on gender-affirming care for minors—care that is currently banned in the state. Democrats in the state legislature had tried to block the anti-abortion ballot measure proposal from advancing, but Republicans broke their filibuster with 'a rare procedural maneuver to shut down debate and force a vote on a measure that would repeal Amendment 3,' as St. Louis Public Radio reported. Amendment 3 campaign leaders forcefully denounced both the new ballot measure and the legislature's underhanded attempt to reverse the will of Missouri voters. 'This deceptive amendment is a trojan horse to reinstate Missouri's total abortion ban,' Tori Schafer, director of policy and campaigns at the ACLU of Missouri, said in a statement. At protests on the steps of the state Capitol in Jefferson City, Amendment 3 supporters were now fighting to hang onto their victory, as they have had to many times this session. 'This past November, more than 1.5 million Missourians made their voices heard at the ballot box,' Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, said. 'Missourians are used to fighting back and are prepared to keep showing up.' Two weeks later, abortion access in the state would be all but nonexistent again, after Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary Russell ordered Judge Zhang to vacate her temporary injunction and to reevaluate the Planned Parenthood affiliates' request, this time using a stricter standard. The ACLU of Missouri, which is co-counsel in the legal challenge, told The New Republic that it had 'immediately' responded to the order by sending correspondence to the court, 'highlighting that our arguments met this standard.' Tom Bastian, ACLU of Missouri director of communications, added that while the group 'can't predict when the court will act, we anticipate new orders … granting the preliminary injunctions blocking the ban and restrictions, once again allowing Missourians access to abortion care.' For now, then, those Missourians will be doing what they did before election night, before Dobbs: going out of state or self-managing their abortion with pills. In this, the reality for abortion in Missouri looks a lot like it did back when the near-total ban passed. The difference is that now more than $30 million has been spent on a ballot measure meant to reverse that ban. As the legal scholar Mary Ziegler pointed out this week, it is possible that Missourians' abortion rights will prevail, that Planned Parenthood will get its injunction, or even that the new anti-abortion ballot measure may fail. However, as she wrote, 'what is happening in Missouri is still a sign about the limits of ballot measures.' Advocates in other states should be asking: What is such a 'win' worth? The legal battle over Amendment 3 is nothing new, as Planned Parenthood's initial filing in this legal challenge acknowledged. 'The State of Missouri has spent decades attempting to eliminate or severely reduce abortion access,' its petition stated. 'This means that Plaintiffs have spent decades challenging these laws.' The lengths that Missouri lawmakers have been willing to go since the election, unfortunately, indicate that this is not a fair fight in fair courts. 'It's time for simple honesty,' What's Next said to me this week. People will have unreliable and irregular access to abortion 'until we shift power away from fascist politicians.' The reality is that this fight for the constitutional right to abortion was playing out at the same time that our constitutional rights were being ignored and undermined on a regular basis. Before we fundraise millions more dollars to replicate the fight in other states—fundraising that will be justified as 'restoring' access to abortion by making it a right—we might consider other, more immediate ways to give people what they need. That money might be better spent on paying for actual abortions, as abortion funds across the country do, helping people in the many states with abortion bans to access care. In a legal system that cannot be counted upon, there may be no more direct way of supporting a fundamental right.
