Joe Hendrickson / stock.adobe.com
Just hours after voters in Missouri succumbed to a super-funded, fearmongering abortion rights campaign, Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit seeking not only to strike down the state’s pro-life law protecting unborn babies but also to dismantle any health regulations in place to ensure the safety of women in abortion facilities.
“Missouri will be the first state with a post-Dobbs total abortion ban to approve and implement a state constitutional amendment making abortion a fundamental right,” Planned Parenthood boasted in a press statement Wednesday.
The abortion industry giant wants totally unrestricted abortion, and now, with Amendment 3 approved, is seeking to protect abortionists and to block the enforcement of what Planned Parenthood sees as these “restrictions”:
Multiple outright abortion bans, including:
- The first total abortion ban triggered by the Dobbs decision
- Cascading gestational age bans
- Bans that stigmatize and limit abortion care based on a patient’s reason for having an abortion
TRAP laws that unfairly target abortion providers, including:
- Unnecessary facility requirements
- Hospital admitting privileges requirements
- Biased and medically inaccurate counseling requirements
- Forced delay periods that require patients to make multiple trips to a clinic for care
- A ban on the delivery of medication abortion by telemedicine
- A physician-only law that prevents qualified medical professionals from providing abortion care
Criminal penalties for abortion providers
“Missourians have spoken and we’re ready to deliver,” Emily Wales, CEO of Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in the statement.
Although Amendment 3 does not go into effect until December 5, Richard Muniz, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said, according to a report Thursday at St. Louis Public Radio, “Our plan and our hope is to provide the first abortions in Missouri again on December 5.”
Amendment 3 was approved by a vote of about 52%-48%. Dubbed the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative,” the measure allows abortion at any time during pregnancy and for any reason, and places abortion – the intention of which is to produce a dead baby – among other issues related to pregnancy and care of mothers and newborn babies.
The amendment states:
The Government shall not deny or infringe upon a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which is the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions.
Now, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are pushing forward with the lawsuit that “seeks to enjoin Missouri’s numerous abortion bans and countless burdensome, medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion that do not improve care or protect patient health.”
Despite the fact that Missouri’s “Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act” clearly provides for immediate care to be provided to women in any pregnancy emergency, the abortion industry and its allies in medicine and media instilled fear in women with what pro-life OB/GYN Christina Francis, M.D. called “blatant lies.”
“Shame on you @ProjectLincoln for spreading blatant lies,” Francis posted to X after the anti-Trump group Project Lincoln produced a video featuring a frenzied doctor hovering over a young woman in a serious pregnancy emergency. The doctor claims he cannot perform an abortion because “if we give her an abortion we all go to jail!”
“Every law in the country allows for OBGYNs like me to intervene immediately when a woman has a potentially life-threatening condition,” Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), shot back. “Stop intimidating people with lies. Prolife laws protect women and girls.”
Missouri’s pro-life law clearly provides the exception for emergencies, stating: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no abortion shall be performed or induced upon a woman, except in cases of medical emergency.”
An organized group of doctors and other medical professionals signed an endorsement of Amendment 3 that made the claim the state’s pro-life law is forcing women “to continue life-threatening pregnancies.” Doctors, the signers wrote, “can’t treat patients with heartbreaking pregnancy complications until they are on the brink of death,” or else risk being prosecuted.
Interestingly, however, only about 90 of the more than 800 pro-abortion medical professionals who signed onto the endorsement are actually in the OB/GYN field.
CatholicVote Director of Government Affairs Tom McClusky said Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit in Missouri is typical of its aggressive actions after pro-abortion ballot amendments are approved.
“As we saw in other states, abortion giant Planned Parenthood is raring at the bit to kill future generations, while profiting,” McClusky commented. “They pour millions into the state amendments and then sue to force the states to embrace the abortion agenda.”
