KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The effort to allow Missouri voters to decide the future of abortion rights in the state at the ballot box in November has someone many might view as an unlikely ally — Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican.
Hawley did not signal support for changing Missouri’s abortion ban, which went into effect in June 2022 when a remade Supreme Court of the U.S. struck down Roe v. Wade.
However, Hawley — a former Missouri attorney general and Kansas City native, who supported and celebrated Roe’s demise — believes voters should have the right to decide for themselves.
“Absolutely,” Hawley said in an interview Thursday with KSHB 41. “This is what the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs does is that it takes away the abortion issue from the court from nine people. Why should nine people get to impose their views, whatever they are, on the rest of America? I mean, the Constitution leaves this issue to the people.”
Missouri lawmakers enacted a “trigger law” that had been passed in 2019, which imposed almost blanket restrictions on procedures to terminate an unwanted pregnancy — there are limited exceptions for a medical emergency but no exceptions in the case of rape or incest — after Roe was overturned.
“Voters could change their minds — they can change the law that's on the books in their state now; they can come back later and change it again,” Hawley said. “That is their right. So, I'm absolutely in favor of voters getting to weigh in on this as many times as they want to.”
If organizers are successful at getting a question before voters in 10 months, November would mark the first time Missouri voters directly decided the issue in the state.
“My view is the voters should decide, whether that's by voting for state representatives or voting themselves at the ballot box,” he said.
Missouri’s restrictive abortion law makes it a Class B felony for any doctor who performs an abortion, placing the “burden of persuasion” on the doctor in cases deemed a medical emergency.
Abortion was legal in Missouri during the first 22 weeks of gestation prior to the near-total ban.
Planned Parenthood in St. Louis was the only clinic offering abortion services in Missouri at the time of the trigger ban going into effect.
The initiative-petition process, which gives Missouri residents an avenue for amending the constitution when the legislature fails to act, requires gathering signatures — a process Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey fought hard to delay and obstruct.
Missouri voters have used the constitutional-amendment mechanism to legalize medical and recreational marijuana and expand Medicare in recent years.
In Kansas, abortion remains legal after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution protects abortion rights in 2019.
Conservatives in Kansas tried to amend the state constitution two months after the Dobbs decision struck down 50 years of precedent set by Roe v Wade, but voters resoundingly rejected Amendment 2 by a nearly 20% margin.
Since the fall of Roe, voters have consistently affirmed abortion rights or blocked attempts to curtail abortion at the polls, even in strongly Republican-controlled states.
A Republican strategist in Missouri has proposed a competing constitutional amendment, which would restrict abortion to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and include exceptions for rape and incest.
Hawley has supported exemptions for rape, incest and when the mother’s health is imperiled in the past.
—
