Late last night, at around 11:30PM CDT, The Missouri Senate successfully overridden the veto of
HB1307 by a
23-7 vote. Just a couple of hours earlier, the
House successfully overridden the veto by a 117-44 margin. The bill increases the abortion waiting time from 24 to 72 hours, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or other circumstances that threaten the life of the woman.
NBC News:
Missouri lawmakers have overridden a veto to enact one of the nation's longest abortion waiting periods.
Legislators passed a measure Wednesday that will require women to wait 72 hours after consulting a physician before having an abortion. That's the second most-stringent standard behind South Dakota, where a 72-hour wait can sometimes extend longer because weekends and holidays are not counted.
Utah is the only other state with a 72-hour wait, but it has exceptions for rape, incest and other circumstances.
STLToday.com:
Missouri's new waiting period law will take effect 30 days after the veto-override vote.
Planned Parenthood, which operates Missouri's only licensed abortion clinic in St. Louis, has not said whether it will challenge the 72-hour waiting period court. But the organization has said its patients travel an average of nearly 100 miles for an abortion, and an extra delay could force them to either make two trips or spend additional money on hotels.
Women also could travel just across the state line in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas to abortion clinics in Illinois and Kansas that don't require as long of a wait.
Missouri's current waiting-period also lacks an exception for rape or incest. It requires physicians to provide women information about medical risks and alternatives to abortion and offer them an opportunity for an ultrasound of the fetus.
[...]
Missouri has a history of enacting abortion restrictions. Republican and Democratic lawmakers twice previously joined together to override vetoes of abortion bills — enacting what proponents referred to as a partial-birth abortion ban in 1999 and instituting a 24-hour abortion waiting period in 2003.
Three Missouri clinics have quit offering abortions in the past decade, and the number performed in Missouri has declined by one-third to a little over 5,400 last year.
KWMU (St. Louis Public Radio):
The Missouri General Assembly has made the state the third in the country to require a 72-hour waiting period before a woman can obtain an abortions, after the state Senate killed off a filibuster.
The Senate voted 23-7 – along party lines -- to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of the bill, but only after deploying a procedural action that it hadn’t used in seven years to end a Democratic filibuster that had gone on for about two hours.
The last time the procedure – called "moving the previous question’’ – was used was in 2007, when the Senate also was temporarily paralyzed by an abortion bill. Dubbed a "PQ'' for short, the procedure allows a simply majority of senators to end a filibuster.
The Senate action came several hours after the House had voted 117-44 in favor of the override. The House supporters had included almost all Republicans and nine Democrats.
Both votes reflected the intense passions on both sides of the abortion debate, underscored earlier Wednesday by the two morning rallies that had attracted hundreds of people to the state Capitol.
Tweets that sum up the disgraceful veto override vote on HB1307: