Missouri's total war on Planned Parenthood
Republicans aren't stopping at abortion bans.
Given the sinkhole of conspiracies that is Elon Musk’s X, it shouldn’t be surprising that Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s hard-right attorney general, used the platform to announce he was suing Planned Parenthood for “trafficking” minors out of state to obtain abortions without parental consent.
It’s the perfect venue for Bailey to go on a fact-free screed about Planned Parenthood. But as much as the announcement was unserious, there’s nothing funny about the lawsuit.
Missouri already bans abortions entirely, except to save the life of the pregnant person. Indeed, Republicans in the state are so hardcore that last month they voted down an attempt to add exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest.
One GOP state senator, Rick Brattin, went so far as to say that forcing someone to give birth to a child that is the product of rape could be therapeutic: “If you want to go after the rapist, let’s give him the death penalty. Absolutely, let’s do it … But not the innocent person caught in-between that, by God’s grace, may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.”
Notably, in Brattin’s framing, the pregnant person doesn’t even exist. There’s the rapist, who should be put to death, and the baby, which will somehow have magical healing powers. The pregnant person will need all the magical healing available since Missouri ranks the 44th worst in the country for maternal mortality, and Black people are four times more likely than white people to die from pregnancy-related complications. Republicans in the state have also floated the idea of bringing homicide charges against people who have abortions.
Rather than show compassion for victims of rape or incest or address the pervasive racial health gap, the state is engaging in a stunt lawsuit to force Planned Parenthood out of the state entirely.
Bailey’s big reveal — that Planned Parenthood is actively helping minors obtain abortions in other states — is predicated on a video from Project Veritas. Yes, the same Project Veritas that just settled a lawsuit where they had to publicly admit their allegations that a Pennsylvania post office backdated mail-in ballots in the 2020 election were a lie. Also the same Project Veritas that was found liable by a Washington DC federal jury in September 2022 for violating federal wiretapping laws for one of its undercover stunts, this time targeted at Democratic political consultants.
Though Project Veritas calls themselves journalists, the judge in that case ruled that they could be referred to as a “political spying operation.” And yes, it’s also the same Project Veritas that released a video purporting to show voter fraud in San Antonio, a video so heavily edited it was described as including “only snippets of what appear to be multiple conversations.” Definitely a very reliable linchpin for a major lawsuit.
The Missouri case is based on a video by Project Veritas that depicts a man who claims he’s a concerned uncle seeking abortion services for his 13-year-old niece. Ostensibly, the video shows employees of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which covers Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, admitting they are involved in transporting minors out of state “every day” for abortions. That would be quite a leap, given that in 2020, when abortion was still legal in Missouri, there were only 167 abortions reported in total across all age groups. The number of abortions for people under 15 was somewhere between 1 and 4 — a number so small it isn’t reported in the CDC’s chart. There were eight abortions performed on people ages 15-19 in Missouri in 2020. But now, somehow, Planned Parenthood is shuttling minors to other states for abortions daily.
The parts of the lawsuit not about the Veritas video focus on alleged issues with abortion care in Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. Those allegations might have more force save for that Planned Parenthood hasn’t performed an abortion in Missouri since June 24, 2022, when abortion became illegal in Missouri.
Another big problem with this lawsuit is that it is based on something entirely imaginary. Even if Project Veritas’s video is unedited and accurately portrays a conversation with Planned Parenthood staff, the “concerned uncle” was asking about services for an underage niece who does not exist. There is no evidence Planned Parenthood has actually helped transport any minor across state lines to get an abortion.
In theory, courts aren’t supposed to rule on speculative fact patterns based on imaginary people. In fact, that’s what former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Wolff told the Missouri Independent: “So far, we’re dealing with fiction …Courts don’t like to address hypothetical questions. They address real cases.” Regrettably, that has not proven true of late, with the United States Supreme Court having taken up multiple cases in the last few years based on lies, simply because those lies allowed the conservatives on the Court to rule as they long had wished.
For decades, conservatives have attacked Planned Parenthood by claiming it makes huge profits from abortion, funded by tax dollars. Never mind that using federal dollars for abortion has been prohibited by the Hyde Amendment since 1976. One of the more absurd allegations has been the fiction that clinics have abortion quotas, so clinic workers have to upsell pregnant people on getting an abortion instead of providing things like prenatal care. States that banned abortions after Roe v. Wade was overturned, though, lost that cudgel.
So, as Bailey is doing in Missouri, they’ve had to find other ways to try to outlaw Planned Parenthood since they can no longer claim that taxpayer money is being used on abortions. However, Planned Parenthood still provides a lot of other services that conservatives hate, like gender-affirming care, STI testing, and prescribing birth control.
Bailey’s lawsuit is only the most recent effort by Missouri Republicans to get rid of Planned Parenthood. The state keeps trying to block it from receiving reimbursements for services rendered to Medicaid patients. Missouri has lost in court on this twice in the last four years, with the Missouri Supreme Court again ruling against the state only a few weeks ago, saying it was unconstitutional to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving those funds. These losses don’t seem to deter Missouri Republicans, who announced last week that they were introducing yet another bill that tries to do the exact same thing.
All of this is playing out against the backdrop of an abortion ballot initiative moving forward in Missouri — one that Bailey and other Republicans are trying desperately to block. In March of last year, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom filed a proposed constitutional amendment that would amend the state’s constitution to protect reproductive freedom.
In Missouri, after any proposed amendment is filed, it triggers a 56-day time period during which the secretary of state is required to draft a description of the proposal and the state auditor to create a fiscal note as to the likely costs. Only after that can groups start to gather signatures in support of getting the initiative on the ballot. Republican officials ignored that time period, instead taking nearly 150 days.
State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick — himself a staunch abortion foe — wrote a fiscal summary saying that the cost to the state would be quite modest, all of $51,000. Fitzgerald came to that conclusion after talking with 60 state and local agencies. Bailey refused to sign off on the fiscal summary, instead saying that enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution would cost at least $51 billion. Bailey contended that the state could lose all of its Medicaid funding if it allowed abortions, a contention that is peculiar given that all states that allow abortions also get Medicaid funding, albeit not for abortions. He also said that “aborting unborn Missourians will have a deleterious impact on the future tax base.” This went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously against Bailey in July 2023 and ordered him to sign off on Fitzpatrick’s fiscal note.
Then, Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (yes, John Ashcroft’s son) got into the act, drafting official ballot language saying the amendment would “allow for dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions." The ACLU sued, and the Missouri appeals court ruled against Ashcroft in October 2023. Ashcroft appealed, but the Missouri Supreme Court refused to take up the case.
In January 2024, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom finally became able to begin gathering the 171,000 signatures they will need to get the proposed amendment on the November 2024 ballot. Now, Republican legislators are racing to make it harder for voters to alter the state constitution via ballot initiative. GOP legislators in both houses are backing a measure that would change the current requirement that the ballot measure pass by a simple majority to a requirement to do both that and to win in a majority of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. Some Republicans hope they can get this on the August 2024 primary ballot to be in effect for November 2024.
All of these efforts don’t just show a disregard for reproductive health rights. They show a profound disregard for democracy. Republicans in Missouri are making it very clear they don’t believe they have to follow the law, nor do they have to respect the will of the people. All they really believe in is forcing their very narrow, very conservative worldview on the rest of us.
That’s it for todayy
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. Thanks as always for your support.
Thank you for exposing our pain.
- St. Louis Missouri Resident
Thank you for writing about this very important issue. It is just infuriating how Republicans are trying to eliminate any and all opposition in their quest to make women legal dependent children. We have to defeat them before they take away our right to vote.