Missouri judge rules that abortion ballot measure is invalid

A Missouri court late Friday moved toward striking a ballot measure in November that would ask voters whether to establish a right to abortion in the state constitution.

Judge Christopher Limbaugh of Cole County Circuit Court sided with anti-abortion lawmakers and activists who said that the abortion rights groups that gathered signatures to sponsor the ballot measure had not sufficiently explained its potential ramifications on the petitions they asked voters to sign.

With the state scheduled to print ballots Tuesday, the judge said he would wait until then to issue an injunction instructing the secretary of state to remove the measure that was certified last month. That will give the abortion rights groups a chance to appeal to a higher court.

The coalition behind the measure vowed to do so immediately, calling the ruling “a profound injustice to the initiative process.” They have expressed optimism that the appeals court will be more sympathetic to their arguments.

That court could decline to act, in which case the measure would be struck from the ballot. But if the appeals court or the state Supreme Court overturns Limbaugh’s ruling before Tuesday, he will not issue an injunction, and the measure, known as Amendment 3, will remain on the ballot.

“Our fight to ensure that voters — not politicians — have the final say is far from over,” Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, said in a statement.

Missouri is one of 10 states where state officials have certified similar ballot measures sponsored by abortion rights groups to appear in November. The groups have been on a winning streak: Voters have already sided with abortion rights in all seven ballot measures that have appeared since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, including measures in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

Missouri and South Dakota, however, are the first states where a yes vote would overturn a near-total ban on abortion. Missouri was the first state to officially ban abortion after Roe fell, prohibiting it except to save the life of a pregnant woman. Supporters of the ballot amendment broke state records for the number of signatures collected, filing 380,159, more than twice the number required to place it before voters.

With polling suggesting that voters support the ballot measures across the country, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers in Missouri and elsewhere have campaigned hard to try to keep the measures from getting on the ballot, proposing legislation that would make it harder to collect signatures or pass the measures, and encouraging voters who signed the petition to remove their names.

Now that state officials have approved the measures to appear on the ballot, anti-abortion activists have sued to try to strike them.

The case before Limbaugh — a former general counsel to Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, who appointed him, and a cousin of Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host who died in 2021 — hinged on a requirement in the Missouri Constitution that requires that each initiative petition include “an enacting clause and the full text of the measure,” and identify all sections of the law or the constitution that would be repealed if the amendment were passed.

The petitions that abortion rights groups circulated included the full text of the measure. But anti-abortion activists contended that the amendment’s language protecting “a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom” could have far-reaching effects that the petitions did not mention. Their lawyer argued that the amendment — which would allow abortion until the fetus is viable outside the uterus, around 24 weeks, but permit the state to regulate it after that — could affect state laws that ban minors from getting gender-affirming health care, and prohibit human cloning.

A lawyer for the abortion rights groups said that it would be impossible to know what laws might be affected until those laws were challenged in court cases if the amendment passed.

But Limbaugh said the petitions had failed to include mention of any laws the amendment might affect, calling this a “blatant violation” of the requirements.

In a statement late Friday, the anti-abortion activists and lawmakers who filed the suit seeking to strike the ballot measure said, “There is no way to know if the proponents of this radical amendment would have gathered enough signatures to place this on the ballot if the truth about the staggering scope of laws Amendment 3 invalidates had been disclosed.”

Anti-abortion groups have sued to try to remove similar measures from the ballots in other states. In Arizona, the state’s Supreme Court rejected that effort, ruling that signatures had been collected properly. On Monday, the Nebraska Supreme Court will consider a similar challenge. A trial over whether to strike the measure from the ballot in South Dakota is scheduled to start at the end of September.

Republicans who control state government in Missouri have worked hard over the past 18 months to defeat the prospective amendment. On Thursday, a separate court ruled against them in another case, saying that the language describing the ballot amendment that Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft had approved to appear on summaries posted at polling places was “unfair, insufficient, inaccurate and misleading” and “gives voters the wrong idea of what the amendment will accomplish.”

The summary approved by Ashcroft, a Republican opposed to abortion, had stated that a “yes” vote would, among other things, “enshrine the right to abortion at any time of pregnancy in the Missouri Constitution” and “prohibit any regulation of abortion, including regulations designed to protect women undergoing abortions.”

Abortion rights groups had sued, noting that, like those proposed in almost every other state, the amendment would allow Missouri to regulate abortion after viability.