Missouri judge again blocks many of the state's anti-abortion laws
The order by Jackson County Circuit Judge Jerri Zhang said the abortion restrictions likely violate a state constitutional right to abortion that was approved by voters last year.
Planned Parenthood said the order clears the way for it to again provide procedural abortions in Missouri.
But Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said his office 'will expeditiously appeal this ruling.'
The court order marks the latest twist in a multiyear battle that has seen Missouri swing back and forth between banning and allowing most abortions.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, it triggered a Missouri law to take effect banning abortions 'except in cases of medical emergency." But abortion-rights activists gathered initiative petition signatures to reverse that law.
Last November, voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to abortion until fetal viability, generally considered sometime past 21 weeks of pregnancy. That made Missouri the only state where voters have used a ballot measure to overturn a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
The state Supreme Court ruled in May that Zhang had applied the wrong standard when issuing rulings in February and December that blocked Missouri's abortion restrictions.
Upon reconsideration, Zhang again issued preliminary injunctions against the abortion ban. The judge also reimposed a hold on various other laws, including a 72-hour waiting period for abortions, numerous abortion facility licensure requirements and a mandate that physicians performing abortions have admitting privileges at certain types of hospitals located within 30 miles (48 kilometers) or 15 minutes of where an abortion is provided.
'Abortion is legal again in Missouri because voters demanded it and we fought for it,' said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. 'Care starts again on Monday in Kansas City."
Planned Parenthood clinics in central Missouri and St. Louis also "will work as quickly as possible to resume scheduling abortion appointments,' said Margot Riphagen, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Rivers.
The attorney general's office said it will keep up the legal fight.
'Missouri will not stand idly by while the abortion industry seeks to strip away basic medical safeguards,' Bailey's office said in a statement. "We will continue to uphold the State's compelling interest in protecting women's health, safety, and informed consent.'
Thursday's order did not address medication abortions, which remain on hold while Planned Parenthood wrangles with the state over abortion regulations.
The court battle is just one part of Missouri's ongoing abortion debate.
In May, the Republican-led Legislature approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would reimpose an abortion ban — but with exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. The measure could be on the ballot in 2026 or sooner.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
Matt Gaetz has the solution for the Ukraine War: Make Russia part of NATO
Matt Gaetz, the former Florida Republican congressman and short-lived attorney general nominee, suggested in his new job as a host on One America News that Russia be offered NATO membership as a way to end the war in Ukraine. 'I've got an idea. Offer NATO membership to Russia,' said Gaetz during Monday's edition of The Matt Gaetz Show. 'Of course, for this carrot, Trump would need to get everything he wants out of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin regarding the end of hostilities, economic cooperation, and territorial disputes.' 'Before you suggest I'm crazy for thinking about NATO and Russia as partners, the idea has been floated by foreign policy thinkers on the right and left for some time,' he added. 'In 1997, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on NATO expansion. President Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, reflected on groundbreaking cooperation between NATO and Russia.' 'That fruit didn't germinate because instead of doubling down on cooperation with Russia, the thinking prevailed that we had to expand NATO and encircle Russia. We learned that an animal backed into a corner can lash out,' Gaetz argued. 'We chose encirclement over cooperation when people were saying cooperation could be part of our forward-looking path with Russia.' The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War to counter the Soviet Union. While NATO worked to establish a partnership with Russia following the end of the Cold War, all cooperation ceased when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. 'Michael McFaul was President Obama 's ambassador to Russia. In 2006, he wrote an article entitled, 'Why a Democratic Russia Should Join NATO,'' Gaetz went on. 'Again, this reinforces that NATO membership is an earned reward, not an entitlement, but why not give Russia a chance to earn it?' Russia became the first country to join NATO's Partnership for Peace programme in June 1994. Its goals were to expand political and military cooperation in Europe. In late May 1997, NATO leaders and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, sharing their wish to 'build together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security.' During President Vladimir Putin's time in power, between 2002 and 2008, NATO and Russia participated in the NATO-Russia Council, the formal meetings of which came to an end amid Russia's military action in Georgia in 2008. NATO's website now states that 'The Russian Federation is the most significant and direct threat to Allies' security.' 'NATO membership for Russia isn't coming tomorrow, but to make peace, everyone needs to give up something and get something,' said Gaetz. 'Everyone needs to feel safer in peace than at war. Making war is easy; all you have to do is attack. Making peace is hard, but at least the Trump administration is making progress. We believe that progress could and ultimately should lead to NATO expansion to Russia if everyone behaves.' Gaetz's comments came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a cadre of European leaders met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday. An administration official said Sunday that Putin agreed at his Alaska summit with Trump on Friday that the U.S. and its European allies could offer Ukraine a security guarantee in the shape of NATO's collective security mandate as part of a possible deal to end the full-scale war started by Russia in February 2022. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff appeared on CNN 's State of the Union on Sunday, saying that it 'was the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.' He added that it was 'game-changing.' 'We were able to win the following concession: that the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO,' Witkoff added.
The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
Meloni caught making strange confession to Trump at Ukraine summit
Giorgia Meloni was heard telling Donald Trump that she never wants to speak to the Italian press during the summit on Ukraine in Washington, DC on Monday, 18 August. As European leaders including Sir Keir Starmer sat round a table with the US president, the Italian prime minister remarked: "He [Mr Trump] loves it, he loves it and he does it always. I never want to speak with my press." Ms Meloni's comment was caught on camera as reporters were leaving the room ahead of a meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr Trump and European leaders.
The Guardian
15 minutes ago
- The Guardian
US surveillance firms run a victory lap amid Trump's immigration crackdown
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, currently enjoying Shirley Jackson's eerie final novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Surveillance is industrializing and privatizing. In the United States, it's big business, and it's growing. My colleagues Johana Bhuiyan and Jose Olivares report on the companies aiding Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which are running a victory lap after their latest quarterly financial reports: Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration's crackdown on immigrants. 'Well, as usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers,' said Alex Karp, the Palantir chief executive, in an investor call earlier this week. Then he crowed about the company's 'extraordinary numbers' and his 'enormous pride' in its success. Private prison company executives, during their respective calls, could barely contain their excitement, flagging to investors opportunities for 'unprecedented growth' in the realm of immigration detention. Read the full story: Companies aiding Trump's immigration crackdown see 'extraordinary' revenues Meanwhile, Microsoft's cloud computing product is enabling the mass surveillance of Palestinian phone lines, per an investigation published in the Guardian. Armed with Azure's near-limitless storage capacity, the IDF's Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The cloud-based system – which first became operational in 2022 – enables Unit 8200 to store a giant trove of calls daily for extended periods of time. Read the full story: 'A million calls an hour': Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians Microsoft has not been publicly enthusiastic about the surveillance initiative and has launched an internal inquiry following the story. Listen: How Israel used Microsoft technology to spy on Palestinians – podcast Russia restricts WhatsApp and Telegram, alleging apps used for fraud and terrorism Crypto mogul Do Kwon pleads guilty to fraud for $40bn market collapse Elon Musk threatens Apple with lawsuit over OpenAI, sparking Sam Altman feud Can't pay, won't pay: impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy 'Shut it down and start again': staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis Meta finds itself under the harsh lens of an investigation by the US Congress, once again over issues of child safety. Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into the company late last week. Reuters had surfaced an internal document from the company detailing a policy of allowing AI chatbots to engage in 'romantic or sensual' conversations with children. The company has since nixed the guidelines. Everything about the backlash feels familiar. The same reporter that published the initial Reuters story, Jeff Horwitz, broke the Facebook Files story in the Wall Street Journal, which unearthed documents showing that Meta understood that using its social networks could lead teens, particularly girls, into depression. The senator who opened the most recent inquiry, Hawley, likewise grilled Zuckerberg about child safety issues in early 2024. Since so many elements of the controversy are so familiar, will it inspire outrage or apathy? Plausible lines of logic could lead to both. Will this uproar bring stringent regulation down on Zuckerberg's head? Or will the US populace and lawmakers shrug and say they've seen this before? Read the full story: Meta faces backlash over AI policy that lets bots have 'sensual' conversations with children Humans are facing off against robots IRL and online. My colleague Amy Hawkins reports from the arena of China's robot games: After spectators in the 12,000-seater National Speed Skating Oval, built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, stood for the Chinese national anthem on Friday morning, the government-backed games began. As well as kickboxing, humanoids participated in athletics, football and dance competitions. One robot had to drop out of the 1500-metre because its head flew off partway round the course. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion Read the full story: Box, run, crash: China's humanoid robot games show advances and limitations Online, AI chatbots' creators are acting less combative. Programmers at Anthropic are imbuing their creations with features to defuse conflict. My colleague Rob Booth reports on Anthropic's latest safety measure that allows the chatbot to close down potentially 'distressing' conversations with users, citing the need to safeguard the AI's 'welfare', per announcement from the company: Anthropic, whose advanced chatbots are used by millions of people, discovered its Claude Opus 4 tool was averse to carrying out harmful tasks for its human masters, such as providing sexual content involving minors or information to enable large-scale violence or terrorism. The San Francisco-based firm, recently valued at $170bn, has now given Claude Opus 4 (and the Claude Opus 4.1 update) – a large language model (LLM) that can understand, generate and manipulate human language – the power to 'end or exit potentially distressing interactions'. Read the full story: Chatbot given power to close 'distressing' chats to protect its 'welfare' The Cambridge Dictionary announced on Sunday that it had added a slew of new words to the dictionary. With the new entries, British lexicographers nodded to the influence of the internet on the way we speak and write. 'Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,' said the dictionary's lexical programme manager, Colin McIntosh. Among the words were 'tradwife', short for 'traditional wife', and 'delulu', an elongated abbreviation of 'delusional'. Both are more notable for their connotations – the former of social conservatism expressed through marital behavior and the latter of the knowing, winking choice to follow a misinformed path – than their denotations. Read the full story: 'Skibidi', 'delulu' and 'tradwife' among words added to Cambridge Dictionary One other, in my mind more interesting, word was entered into the dictionary: skibidi, of 'skibidi toilet' fame, referring to a series of animated shorts in which menacing human heads emerge from toilets and do battle with TV-headed men in suits. The toilets begin to sing a part of the song Dom Dom Yes Yes, which includes the line 'Shtibididob dob dob dob dob yes yes' if the viewer is watching with sound. To English speakers, the first word has been transliterated to 'skibidi'. The Cambridge Dictionary defines skibidi as 'a word that can have different meanings such as 'cool' or 'bad', or can be used with no real meaning as a joke', an example of its use is: 'What the skibidi are you doing?'' When I was a child, my parents would look on in confusion as my siblings and I watched SpongeBob SquarePants on Saturdays. The show was incomprehensible to them in all ways – premise, plots, visuals, voices. Think of the animated toilets as a gen Alpha successor, delightful to children in bizarreness, doubly so because of the baffled looks on the faces of their parents. 'Tradwife' and 'delulu' have fixed meanings that refer to real human actions and emotions. 'Skibidi', on the other hand, with its use as an emphatic, humorous filler word with 'no real meaning', per Cambridge refers to nothing so much as the hurtling feeling of scrolling through too many videos in one sitting. When we are so overwhelmed with moving images, conflicting perspectives, and advertising, what words are useful? Perhaps only skibidi. Jean Baudrillard coined the concept of the 'simulacra' – words or images without an origin in reality and which refer to no real thing – when writing about the media of his day, especially television. 'Skibidi' is a likewise hyperreal word, referring only to the strange and continual refraction of meaning that a particular word has undergone online. 'The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory,' he wrote in 1981. The word does not precede the TikTok, nor survive it. Henceforth, it is the video that precedes the definition. Man develops rare condition after ChatGPT query over stopping eating salt Is AI going to steal your job? Not if you work in cleaning, construction or hospitality, Australian report finds The secrets of the world's richest company – podcast The Ice alert app founder sparking fury in Trump officials: 'Pam Bondi said I better watch out? Please.' Teenage girls making TikToks: Philippa James's best photograph
