Missouri women have fought for abortion rights for decades. They’re still fighting

She’s one of the many women I met when I volunteered for the effort who has been working for access to reproductive healthcare in Missouri since before I was born — some of them since before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973.

Marlene provided counseling at Missouri’s first abortion clinic, Reproductive Health Services in St. Louis, for 22 years, nearly all of it as a volunteer. She helped prospective patients weigh their options to end their pregnancies, parent or make it through their pregnancies and place their babies for adoption (the clinic had an adoption service on site for a time). 

Marlene calmed women and girls who had been bullied or called murderers when they sought care at anti-abortion facilities posing as abortion clinics. She’d tell patients what to expect during the procedure. For years, she and other counselors would give patients their home phone numbers in case they had questions or needed to talk after their procedures. Marlene estimates she counseled three thousand women.

Rose-Lynn Sokol also worked at Reproductive Health Services. She was there times the FBI came to tell them to check under their cars for bombs, to change their routes driving home, to be careful opening mail. She was there when an Illinois abortion provider serving the St. Louis area and his wife were abducted. She was there when Reproductive Health Services’ other location in St. Louis County was firebombed. 

Rose-Lynn told me this only because I asked, her voice just as-matter-of-fact as she would explain a step in the ballot process to fellow volunteers.

Like most citizen-led ballot initiatives, the 2024 effort to decriminalize abortion was a huge lift. Advocates had to raise millions of dollars, recruit thousands of volunteers, collect hundreds of thousands of signatures and win five lawsuits against elected officials who sought to block the process. 

This is an arduous and inefficient way to make law. And yet, it would have been a disaster to lose it, had Missourians not voted down Amendment 4 last week. 

Amendment 4 would have made it impossible to amend the Missouri Constitution via citizen-led ballot initiatives by raising the bar for passage from a majority of the statewide vote to a majority of the vote in each of our eight congressional districts.

The fact that Amendment 4 was opponents’ answer to Missouri citizens having legalized abortion was not much discussed. So I was frankly grateful to see two abortion opponents say the quiet part out loud to the Kansas City Star, and U.S. Rep. Bob Onder lay out the plan to re-criminalize abortion in a Heartland News op-ed. 

Republican legislators referred a new constitutional amendment to the ballot that will reinstate the abortion ban if Missourians vote for it in November. It will be called Amendment 3. 

The goal of Amendment 4, Onder explained, was to keep the majority of Missourians who support legal abortion access from ever being able to decriminalize abortion in the future should Amendment 3 succeed in reinstating the ban.

That is where Onder’s honesty ended. He went on to repeat talking points from our anti-abortion elected officials that erase or vilify those of us who worked to make abortion legal. 

Onder said “our constitution shouldn’t be for sale.” Attorney General Catharine Hanaway complained of “tyranny of the majority” and living under “mob rule.” Gov. Mike Kehoe lamented “out of state special interests” being able to change our constitution with a “dump truck load of money.” Others railed about the radical left or funding from George Soros (a classic antisemetic dog-whistle).

No one paid me to tromp down dirt paths in the heat or shiver in the wind outside concert venues collecting signatures. Did the campaign also raise money from out of state and hire paid signature gatherers? You bet. Sadly, that’s what it takes. But advocates had to come up with millions of dollars in-state just to get the effort off the ground. 

As the executive director of one of the major donors to the effort, The Fairness Project, explained, they can’t invest if there isn’t a grassroots campaign to invest in.  

Kehoe’s suggestion that there is something illicit about raising money from out of state was particularly disingenuous given that his failed Amendment 5 campaign was powered by a dump truck load of dark money.

Our elected officials took a similar good-for-the-goose-but-not-the-gander approach to the vote threshold: Amendment 4’s impossibly high standard would have applied to citizen-led amendments, but not those referred to the ballot by legislators.

Missouri’s abortion ban was tyranny of the minority — not that tyranny of the majority would be any better when it comes to whether the state can use the force of criminal law to conscript your body to bring another human being into the world against your will. 

Hanaway’s claim that we are living under “mob rule” because engaged citizens have accomplished what the legislature won’t is false and dehumanizing.  We’re Missourians. We’re women. We’re much better positioned than the state to determine what is best for our lives, families, and health. 

It makes me angry and exhausted that legal recognition of my dignity and bodily autonomy is repeatedly up for a vote since the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that those aren’t fundamental rights after all. 

But I don’t think about that when I’m in the room or on the sidewalk with women who have seen so much worse than me, who have been through so many losses and won so many fragile wins. They just keep doing the work, bringing a joyfulness and sense of solidarity and inspiring many more of us to do it too.