Tried Everything

Missouri Officials Tried Everything to Keep Abortion Off the Ballot. They Just Lost.

An 11th-hour decision gives voters the chance to overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban in November.

Madison Pauly

Reproductive rights advocates in Missouri have beaten back a last-ditch effort by Republican officials to stop voters from having their say on abortion in November. On Tuesday afternoon, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered that a proposed amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution will remain on this year’s ballot.

The ruling ensures that Missourians will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 3, which would establish a right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved, the amendment will set a high legal bar for how the state can regulate abortion prior to “viability”—the difficult-to-pinpoint moment when a fetus becomes likely to survive outside the uterus. After viability, the measure would let the state ban abortion, with exceptions to protect the life and health of the pregnant patient.

The decision caps a roller-coaster of a year for Missouri reproductive rights advocates, who faced hurdle after hurdle to get the measure on the November ballot. Supporters gathered more than 380,000 signatures this spring, circumventing a legislature dominated by hard-line abortion foes who passed the state’s current, near-total abortion ban. A St. Louis University/YouGov poll of 900 likely voters in mid-August found that 52 percent supported Amendment 3 and 34 percent opposed it.

“Today’s decision is a victory for both direct democracy and reproductive freedom in Missouri,” Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the amendment, said in a statement. “This fight was not just about this amendment—it was about defending the integrity of the initiative petition process and ensuring that Missourians can shape their future directly.”

Ballot initiatives have become a central part of the strategy to restore and expand abortion rights in the post-Roe v. Wade era. They’re also key to Democrats’ efforts to turn out voters in battleground states in this year’s tight presidential election. Abortion rights are popular, even in solidly red states; the pro-choice side has won all seven abortion-related measures on state ballots since 2022.

That’s led Republican officials in GOP-dominated states including Arkansas, Florida, and Nebraska to pull out all the stops this year to prevent abortion-rights measures from getting to the ballot in the first place—filing lawsuits, delaying or invalidating petitions, and spreading misinformation.

In Missouri, Tuesday’s ruling comes in response to a last-minute lawsuit by two Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Hannah Kelly and Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, working with anti-abortion activists and lawyers from the Thomas More Society, a law firm aligned with conservative Catholics. They argued that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft should never have certified Amendment 3 because it did not specify which state laws it would repeal. (Missouri law requires initiative petitions to “include all sections of existing law or of the constitution which would be repealed by the measure.”) In a court filing, they claimed that the Amendment 3 campaign “defrauded potential signers” and that the measure “would have far-reaching effects,” including on Missouri’s rules on human cloning and single-sex bathrooms.

Amendment supporters responded that no state laws would be automatically repealed. Instead, advocates would have to file lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws, with judges making the final decisions about which ones violate the new constitutional amendment. “This is another example of someone flailing, trying to gum the works of a campaign that has serious momentum,” said Mallory Schwartz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, part of the pro-Amendment 3 coalition. “What they’re really doing is trying to deny people access to direct democracy.” 

The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision overturns a surprise ruling by Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh last Friday evening declaring that the vote on the amendment should be canceled—though he left time for an appeal. Judge Limbaugh, a cousin of the late conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, was appointed to the bench by his former boss, Republican Gov. Mike Parson, barely five weeks ago.

Ashcroft defended his certification in a hearing before Limbaugh. But following the Friday ruling, Ashcroft sent the abortion-rights campaign a letter announcing that he was decertifying Amendment 3 himself. “On further review in light of the circuit court’s judgment, I have determined the amendment is deficient,” he wrote.

In its Tuesday ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Ashcroft to recertify Amendment 3 for the ballot, ruling that the deadline for him to issue a certification decision had passed.

For Ashcroft and other Missouri Republicans, the decision is yet another rebuke in a long and exhausting campaign to keep the amendment off the ballot. In at least four previous lawsuits, Missouri courts have slapped down state officials’ attempts to interfere with the amendment.

First, state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is running for reelection, held up the initiative for months by pushing a baseless theory that the initiative could cost the state billions in federal Medicaid funding and declining to rubber-stamp a cost estimate prepared by the state’s auditor. After a legal battle, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Bailey to stop stonewalling.

Then last fall, Kelly and Coleman—the same legislators behind the latest lawsuit—seized on Bailey’s phony theory about Medicaid funding and sued the state auditor over his cost estimate. They too were slapped down by the courts, which found the cost estimate “fair and sufficient.”

Meanwhile, Ashcroft—an outspoken abortion opponent whose job requires him to craft neutral summaries of ballot initiatives—issued summaries claiming the measure would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortion.” Last October, an appeals court ruled those summaries were “replete with politically partisan language.” A circuit court judge completely rewrote them.

But Ashcroft didn’t learn his lesson. Last month, on the same day he certified the amendment for the ballot, he issued “fair ballot language” to be posted at polling places that made a slew of false claims, including that the measure would prohibit legal recourse against “anyone who performs an abortion and hurts or kills the pregnant women.” Last Thursday, Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker threw out Ashcroft’s description, calling it “unfair, insufficient, inaccurate and misleading.”

Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling is a crucial win for the fight to expand abortion rights in Missouri, which has some of the most restrictive laws in the country. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, only one clinic remained open in the state, providing fewer than 100 abortions annually. Hours after the fall of Roe, state officials invoked a dormant law making it a felony to provide abortion in virtually all cases.

Missouri isn’t the only place where state officials have been making last-ditch efforts to block or blunt voter referendums on abortion. On Monday, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments in a trio of lawsuits over dueling amendments—one to protect abortion until viability and another to ban abortion after the first trimester. Arguments focused on whether the protective amendment violates a state rule requiring ballot measures to only cover a single subject, according to the Nebraska Examiner.

Last month in Arkansas, the state Supreme Court threw out thousands of signatures in favor of an abortion-rights measure, ruling that organizers had failed to file training certifications for their paid canvassers in the proper format, the Associated Press reported. The decision affirmed state officials’ move to disqualify the measure from the ballot.

In Florida, the state Attorney General lost a lawsuit arguing that an amendment to protect abortion rights until viability was “too complicated” for voters to understand. But last month, the state Supreme Court approved a fiscal impact statement for Amendment 4 written with the help of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025. Meanwhile, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration unveiled a website on Thursday full of false claims about the initiative, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported. And the Florida Department of State is reportedly investigating 36,000 voter signatures submitted by amendment organizers.

As it stands on Tuesday, ten states will vote on abortion-related measures on the ballot come November. Missouri is one of two where voters could overturn a near-total abortion ban.