Missouri Voters Pass Measure to Protect Abortion Rights and End Ban

Missouri Voters Pass Measure to Protect Abortion Rights and End Ban

A ballot amendment enshrining reproductive rights in the State Constitution would void one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

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By Kate Zernike

Missouri voters approved a ballot amendment that enshrines a right to abortion in the State Constitution, The Associated Press reported, a stunning repudiation of one of the nation’s strictest bans on abortion.

Similarly to measures on the ballot in nine other states, the amendment establishes “a fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” defined as the right “to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care,” including abortion.

Missouri was the first state to enact an abortion ban after the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, and the vote makes it the first to overturn a ban through a citizen-initiated ballot measure.

On Tuesday night, Florida did not pass an abortion-rights ballot measure. But in the 18 months after Roe was overturned, abortion rights groups had prevailed on all seven ballot measures, in states as different as California and Kansas. None of those states, however, had a total ban in effect.

And Missouri has an especially strong tradition of anti-abortion activism. The current ban, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature, prohibits abortion except to save a woman’s life or to prevent substantial impairment to her physical health, with no exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or fatal fetal anomalies.

Abortion rights groups worried that the state was more conservative than Michigan and Ohio, where voters passed similar amendments in 2022 and 2023. And Republicans fought bitterly in court to try to stop the measure from going before voters. But abortion rights groups found unexpected popular support, turning in more than twice the number of signatures they needed to put the measure on the ballot, and setting a state record for the most signatures collected in a single day.

As with those in most other states, the amendment in Missouri allows the state to restrict abortion after fetal viability, the point in pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the uterus “without extraordinary medical measures.”

Abortion rights groups have said that the amendment would take effect 30 days after it passed, and that they would then need to go to court to ask that the state’s ban be officially overturned as unconstitutional.