Missouri Lawmakers File Lawsuit Against Ballot Amendment for Abortion Up to Birth

In a lawsuit filed on August 22, 2024, on behalf of state lawmakers and concerned individuals, Thomas More Society attorneys are challenging the inclusion of proposed Amendment 3 on the November ballot.

The filing alleges that the initiative petition was erroneously certified by Missouri Secretary of State John Ashcroft, because it runs afoul of the Missouri Constitution and state statutes. Amendment 3, also known as the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative” seeks to amend the state constitution to include an unlimited, new “super-right,” called the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” In the proposed amendment, this term is left largely undefined but affects “all matters relating to reproductive health care.”

By failing to specify the laws and constitutional provisions that it would repeal, directly or by implication, the initiative petition that led to proposed Amendment 3 violates both the state’s constitution and its laws. Missouri Revised Statute Section 116.050 requires that signers of an initiative petition be informed of “[t]he full and correct text” of the initiative, which must “[i]nclude all sections of existing law or of the constitution which would be repealed by the measure.” Missourians signing the petition to put Amendment 3 on the ballot did not see this information, despite the clear legal mandate requiring such information to be listed, making those signatures and the petition illegal.

“The petition proposing Amendment 3 violated both state law and the Missouri Constitution, so the Secretary of State was wrong to certify it. Missouri’s laws require drafters to disclose the effects of initiative petitions on other laws and limit the effect of a proposed amendment to one subject, to protect Missouri voters from being defrauded by artfully drafting them into approving something that has hidden effects. Amendment 3 is rife with hidden effects,” said Mary Catherine Martin, Thomas More Society Senior Counsel. “Its main provision creates a totally novel, and limitless, ‘super-right’ ranking higher than life, speech, religion, equal protection, and due process. This would require the courts, when making decisions relating to reproduction, to place this ‘super-right’ above the interests of anyone else, and even of society as a whole.”

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The lawsuit is filed on behalf of Missouri State Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman, pro-life advocate Kathy Forck, State Representative Hannah Kelly, and Our Lady’s Inn President and CEO Peggy Forrest. It details that, as proposed, Amendment 3’s new “super-right” to “reproductive freedom” would repeal essentially all of Missouri’s state statutes and constitutional provisions regulating reproductive care and technologies, including all existing regulation of abortion, cloning, IVF for stem cell research, gender transition surgery, and genital mutilation. That repeal would include the state’s constitutional amendment banning human cloning and IVF for the purposes of stem cell research, the “Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act,” and the “Infant’s Protection Act”—which is the state’s partial-birth abortion law. Additionally, the proposed Amendment 3 would eradicate  state laws that protect unborn children at viability and from abortion based on discrimination (such race, sex, and Down syndrome), and Missouri’s prohibition on the abortion of late-term, pain-capable, unborn children.

“We are asking the court to reverse the certification of Amendment 3 because Missourians have a legal right to an electoral process that follows the law, and the process forcing Amendment 3 on Missouri has not done so,” added Martin. “It is a scorched earth campaign, razing our state lawbooks of critical protections for vulnerable women and children, the innocent unborn, parents, and any taxpayer who does not want their money to pay for abortion and other extreme decisions that this Amendment defines as ‘care.’ To be clear: under our initiative petition process, Missourians are free to tie their hands in this way, but the Constitution and statutes require that they know that they are doing so.”

Among the other provisions of the law that would be repealed by the proposed Amendment 3, persons injured or who died in the course of “exercising their right to reproductive freedom,” as well their family members, would no longer have access to the courts to remedy such injuries, such as in medical malpractice and wrongful death actions. The proposed Amendment 3 would additionally repeal, directly or by implication, parental consent and notification laws, and legal requirements that only physicians perform or induce an abortion.

The lawsuit additionally alleges that proposed Amendment 3, as certified, violates the Missouri Constitution’s Single Subject Rule—which requires that every initiative petition “shall not contain more than one amended and revised article of this constitution, or one new article which shall not contain more than one subject and matters properly connected therewith.” Proposed Amendment 3 sets forth several new legal standards that apply to all the above subjects and more and sets a nondiscrimination standard that would seemingly require access for transgendered persons, as individuals “obtaining reproductive care,” into bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports competitions. The same provision is likely to require state funding for “reproductive care” such as abortion, contraception, and even gender transitions. There is no “central” purpose to the Amendment, as required by the Single Subject rule, the petition alleges.

Because the initiative petition did not satisfy state election laws that protect Missouri voters, the filed petition seeks to reverse the certification of proposed Amendment 3 and remove it from the November ballot.

Read the Petition for Declaratory Judgement and Injunction, filed August 22, 2024, by Thomas More Society attorneys on behalf of Missouri State Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman, Kathy Forck, State Representative Hannah Kelly, and Peggy Forrest, in Coleman, et al. v. Ashcroft, in the Circuit Court of Cole County – State of Missouri, here.

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