JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – As the second half of the 2025 session begins in the Missouri Legislature, Republicans are debating whether to attempt an amendment to undo the state’s recently enshrined “right” to abortion.
Last November, Missouri residents voted 51.6% to 48.5% to add to the state constitution Amendment 3, which establishes a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” that applies to “all matters relating to (so-called) reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions.” It prohibits the legislature from banning abortion until “fetal viability” and after “viability” if an abortionist claims that killing a woman’s unborn child is deemed “needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.”
The amendment effectively invalidated the state’s near-total abortion ban, which only allowed abortion when allegedly necessary to avoid the mother’s death or “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function,” and now Republicans are considering whether and how to take up reversing that in the current session.
“People feel like they didn’t get what they paid for, what they voted for, what they wanted,” outgoing GOP state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman told KY3. “This is something that people are going to continue to fight one way or another. And I have to tell you, whether it passes or it doesn’t pass, this won’t be the last time I think you see something on the ballot here in Missouri, because this has been an ongoing fight for the past 50 years.”
Democrat Minority Leader Doug Beck told KCUR that Democrats intend to resist. “When those things happen and come up, we can have better discussions on it, but right now, we’re behind the voters. We try to support what the voters voted for,” he said.
If passed by the legislature, a repeal of Amendment 3 would have to receive final approval in a ballot referendum. Another complication is just what form repeal would take. LifeSiteNews reported earlier this month that one such proposal has gone before the Missouri Senate Families, Seniors and Health Committee but met with pro-life criticism because, rather than simply removing Amendment 3’s “right” to abortion, it would enshrine in the Missouri Constitution a ban on elective abortions as well as a exceptions for rape, incest, and “medical emergencies,” which the legislature would be powerless to change absent yet another amendment.
Thirteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
Such amendments have been the abortion lobby’s most potent tactic. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe v. Wade using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public.
After 2020, pro-lifers either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, Kansas, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.
