Missourians by now are used to the Legislature’s bottomless contempt for the state’s voters, which the GOP supermajority regularly expresses by immediately attempting to overturn decisions the public has made via ballot referendum.
The latest example of this shameless phenomenon, unfolding this week in Jefferson City, merits especially close scrutiny because lawmakers are not only trying to spurn the expressed will of the voters regarding reproductive rights, but they’re doing it in a fundamentally dishonest way.
It clearly means little to these lawmakers to point out that the people of Missouri have already spoken loud and clear on this issue — but it wouldn’t hurt for them to hear it directly from their constituents.
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The House this week is expected to approve a measure that would ask the voters for a do-over on the landmark abortion-rights constitutional amendment they passed less than six months ago. That measure, Amendment 3, came in response to the draconian near-total ban on all abortion that the state put in place immediately following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Amendment 3 added to Missouri’s constitution a provision effectively restoring reproductive rights as they existed under Roe, including protecting a woman’s right to end a pregnancy at any point before fetal viability. Among the tricks that anti-choice forces used in trying to prevent its passage was to claim the amendment would create a right to transgender treatment for minors.
The amendment does nothing of the sort. It’s entirely about reproductive rights; whatever other debate there is about transgender procedures, they obviously don’t create the capacity for reproduction where it didn’t previously exist. The voters on Nov. 5 wisely ignored the right-wing smoke screen and approved the amendment with about 51.6% of the vote.
The measure now moving through the House repeats that deception, this time in the language of the resolution itself. In addition to throwing up all sorts of roadblocks against abortion rights, the measure declares that, “No gender transition surgeries shall be knowingly performed on children.â€
Such surgery is, first, already illegal under Missouri state law, and second, (again) irrelevant to the issue of reproductive rights. It’s clearly included in the measure as “ballot candy†— that is, an irrelevant but popular statement designed to lure voters who might not otherwise approve of the underlying legislation.
The measure itself is presented as being somewhat more permissive than the previous abortion ban in that it does allow exemptions for victims of rape or incest during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But would that require a police report confirming the crime? It’s an important question, as rape and incest are notoriously underreported to police.
Other potential questions about the issue weren’t allowed to be aired in a House committee hearing on the topic last week because the Republican committee chair shut down testimony in response to abortion-rights supporters protesting at the hearing. But that doesn’t mean Missourians who understand the urgency of this right must remain silent. In fact, they mustn’t.
Contact information for Missouri lawmakers is available at hous sena
