State House slated to pass sweeping new abortion bill

The Republican-led Missouri House is set to pass legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, criminalize mail-order abortion medications, and allow wrongful death lawsuits in rare cases when infants are born alive after an abortion attempt and the infant then dies or is injured.

House lawmakers earlier this week blocked an attention-grabbing amendment to make it illegal to "aid or abet" abortions violating Missouri law, even if they occur out of state.

Instead, the GOP swapped in another amendment that would make it a crime to provide abortion-inducing medications to women. Doctors could still provide those medicines.

Republican Rep. Brian Seitz, who sponsored the medication abortion bill, said the issue with the proposal to penalize helping women travel out of state for abortions was that it has not been vetted through a committee such as his measure has.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion is banned in Missouri, Seitz's change would prohibit telemedicine abortions through medications.

"It's very important that states, especially typically pro-life states, have legislation already in place for the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade," Seitz said.

House members packed the abortion policies together in an omnibus bill Tuesday in hopes of passing the proposals by lawmakers mid-May deadline despite ongoing GOP infighting that's causing work in the Senate to move at a glacial pace.

Advocates of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri spokeswoman Bonyen Lee-Gilmore in a statement called the legislation "a kitchen-sink approach to banning reproductive freedom in Missouri."

"It unlawfully blocks Medicaid patients from preventive care at Planned Parenthood, it spreads inflammatory rhetoric, and seeks to ban common medications used for miscarriages, labor and delivery, and abortion," she said.

Under the amended bill, family members could also file wrongful death suits if infants born alive after an abortion attempt are injured or later die as a result of the attempted abortion. If the pregnancy is the result of rape, the bill would not allow the rapist to sue.

Republican Rep. Hannah Kelly, who sponsored a bill banning fetal tissue donations onto which the other abortion amendments were added, told colleagues during House floor debate Tuesday the born-alive provision represents a chance for justice.

Democratic Rep. Keri Ingle warned that the threat of lawsuits would pit families against each other.

Instances of babies being born alive after an induced pregnancy termination are extremely rare.

A review by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of infant mortality data from 2003 and 2014 showed 143 deaths were of infants that displayed signs of life after an induced termination. That was a tiny fraction of the 315,000 infant deaths during those 12 years, a period that also included 49 million live births.

In a majority of those cases, the abortion was induced because of a maternal complication or congenital anomaly in the fetus.

Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University law professor, said current homicide laws could already offer protections for infants born alive after abortions.

She said similar proposals nationally and in other state have mostly been used as a way for Republicans to show their opposition to abortion while forcing Democrats to argue against bills with the stated intent of cracking down on infanticide.

"What they've been historically designed to do is to frame the debate around issues that are really uncomfortable for supporters of abortion rights," Ziegler said of similar proposals.

The Missouri measure also includes another attempt by Republican lawmakers to strip Planned Parenthood of any public funding, including clinics that do not provide abortions.

Lawmakers were able to stop money from going to Planned Parenthood in the 2019 fiscal year by forgoing some federal funding to avoid requirements the clinics be reimbursed if low-income patients go there for birth control, cancer screenings and other preventative care. Missouri instead used state money to pay for those services.

But the Missouri Supreme Court in 2020 ruled lawmakers violated the constitution by making the policy change through the state budget, forcing the state to reimburse Planned Parenthood for health care provided to Medicaid patients.

It's unclear whether blocking funding through a policy bill instead of the budget will work, but Republican lawmakers have said they're hopeful enough to try again.

A vote to send the sweeping bill to the GOP-led Senate could come as early as next week.