Missouri asks voters to overturn 2024 abortion protections

Conflicting ‘Amendment 3’ measures confuse Missouri voters

Missouri voters who added abortion protections to the state constitution in 2024 will decide this November whether to keep them. The state’s Republican-dominated legislature placed a repeal measure on the ballot under the same title as the amendment it seeks to overturn — Amendment 3 — and the identical numbering has created confusion that organizers on the anti-abortion side say they have had to correct among their own voters.

Kelly McCoomb, who lives in Maplewood, a suburban St. Louis community, kept her 2024 yard sign backing the protections in her basement. Abortion access is important to her: she wants her daughter to grow up in a state where the option is available if needed, and the sign was a keepsake from the day Missourians voted to reverse the state’s near-total ban. She also could not shake the feeling that she would need to display the sign in her yard again soon.

“I have little faith in our Missouri government,” McCoomb said, sitting on her front porch.

Two years later, McCoomb covered the “YES” on her sign with a “NO” made from black duct tape and placed it back in her yard. While a “yes” vote in 2024 supported adding the protections to the state constitution, a “no” vote this year would keep them. Missouri is one of four states weighing abortion measures in the November general election, and one of two — with Nevada — voting on the question a second time since 2024.

The spate of referenda follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended federal abortion protections and left each state to set its own policy. The result is a patchwork of state rules with varying bans and limitations, alongside a series of “shield laws” in states where abortion remains legal aimed at protecting providers from prosecution in states where it is not.

“I just think there’s a constitutional crisis that’s coming,” said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for the anti-abortion organization Students for Life Action. “Can you have 50 state standards on whether or not a human being is a human being? Can you have 50 state standards on whether human beings have legal protection?”

Missouri is the only state voting this year on removing abortion protections already on the books. The measure would repeal the 2024 amendment, which guaranteed abortion access through fetal viability — the point when a fetus can survive after birth, generally considered around 24 weeks — and replace it with a ban carrying exceptions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions for rape or incest would have to occur before 12 weeks of pregnancy.

In Nevada, the ballot measure that Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom introduced to enshrine the state’s law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks after conception received 64% support in 2024. Because Nevada law requires two majority votes to enshrine constitutional amendments, voters must back the expanded protection again in November for it to be enacted. The proposal would not change the state’s existing law but would make any future ban harder to impose, requiring voter approval of a new ban in two elections.

Denise Lopez, president of the coalition Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, said the group has been campaigning to keep voters mobilized. “Folks care about it,” she said. “They’re seeing what’s happening at the national level, and they want to make sure that whatever’s happening in our neighboring states, like Idaho and Utah, doesn’t happen here in Nevada.”

Elsewhere, Idaho voters will decide a recently qualified ballot measure that would establish abortion rights in state statute through fetal viability, in a state with one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. In Utah, abortion is allowed up to 18 weeks while legal challenges to the state’s ban continue. In Virginia, where abortion is already allowed through two trimesters of pregnancy, until 28 weeks, voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to codify those rights.

Missouri was the first state to ban abortion after the Dobbs decision in 2022. Abortions had already mostly ceased there after three decades of state regulations targeting the practice, including a 72-hour waiting period, minimum dimensions for procedure rooms and hallways in clinics that provide abortions, and a requirement that clinicians hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. State records show only 150 abortions were performed in Missouri in 2021, down from 5,772 in 2011. Despite voters backing the 2024 amendment, it took nearly two years for medication abortions to resume in the state.

Margot Riphagen-Dunn, CEO of St. Louis-based Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said the whiplash of a second statewide vote mirrors the confusion patients have experienced about whether abortion is available in the state. “Chaos is kind of the point here,” she said, “and it is absolutely a tactic that gets in the way of being able to provide.”

The confusion has presented problems for abortion opponents as well. Reagan Barklage, vice president of Students for Life of America and treasurer of the Missouri Students for Life Ballot Committee, said she has had to correct anti-abortion voters while canvassing to remind them they are voting “yes” on Amendment 3 this year even though they voted “no” on Amendment 3 last time.

“I think it’s unfortunate,” Barklage said. “People need to be very clear on what they’re voting for.” She added, “It is crazy that it ended up being even the same number. I do not think that was intentional, but we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got,” and “I hope the pro-choicers kept their yard signs from last time.”

Back in Maplewood, McCoomb said she was happy that her repurposed sign had been noticed. “I hope lots of people see and remember to revote,” she said.