Campaign Action
Huzzah to State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed. After the Missouri legislature sent its latest forced-birther bill to the governor, the St. Louis Democrat, first elected in 2012, didn’t hold back in her characterization of yet another obstacle added in the path of women seeking abortions. She said:
“This trash piece of legislation, which isn’t worth the price of the paper it’s printed on, will go down in flames in a court of law.”
That’s the kind of language we ought to hear a lot more often whenever lawmakers in Missouri or any other state choose to make abortion more difficult, more expensive, more time-consuming, more shaming, more a slap in the face to Roe v. Wade and Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
Nasheed thinks the new legislation sent to Eric Greitens, the Republican governor who calls himself “pro-life,” will wind up in court just as some previous regulations have done. In April, a federal judge blocked a Missouri law requiring hospital admitting privileges for physicians who perform abortions and requiring clinics providing abortions to be mini-hospitals. In its Hellerstedt ruling last year, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down similar provisions in a Texas law. Missouri taxpayers also had to cough up more than $156,000 to reimburse Planned Parenthood for legal bills it had to pay in fighting a dispute over a clinic’s abortion license.
Missouri is one of seven states that now have just a single abortion clinic. Lawmakers in several of those states have been eager to try to shut down those solo clinics as well. But their efforts have also run afoul of the federal courts.
That latest “trash piece of legislation” in Missouri encompasses a long list of new regulations:
- allows the state attorney general, not just local prosecutors, to prosecute abortion-law violations;
- requires doctors—not nurses, nurse practitioners or other medical personal—to explain potential medical risks to women 72 hours before they can obtain an abortion;
- establishes surprise, annual inspections of abortion clinics; whistleblower protections for employees of abortion clinics;
- bars local governments from passing ordinances that adversely affect those alternative-to-abortion pregnancy centers—the ones that, nationwide, tell women lies and omit information needed for them to make good decisions about their reproductive health
The legislature had adjourned in May with only the state senate having voted on the abortion restrictions. But the governor called lawmakers back into session six weeks ago to deal specifically with abortion regulations. In the process they added provisions not included in the senate bill.
That bill, said Republican Sen. Ryan Silvey, was the product of hours of negotiations with Democrats. By voting for the House bill without changes, he said, Republicans were reneging on their promises to Democrats, which could make future negotiations on any subject problematic.
The bill passed 22-8, with seven Democrats and Silvey, normally a strong forced-birther, in opposition.