The New Yorker:

Missouri voters approved a measure to protect abortion rights, but opponents have repeatedly blocked it from taking effect.

By Peter Slevin

On Election Day last November, supporters of reproductive rights in Missouri were quietly hopeful. For more than two years, abortion had been all but illegal in the state, owing to a trigger law that went into effect minutes after the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson decision, overturning Roe v. Wade. Only in the case of a medical emergency could a woman get an abortion of a viable fetus, and anyone who provided an abortion under other circumstances would be guilty of a felony. But for months opponents of the law had been campaigning to pass Amendment 3, which would enshrine in the state constitution one’s right “to make decisions about reproductive health care” without government interference. They drew inspiration from neighboring Kansas, which, despite its G.O.P. leanings, had voted by eighteen points to preserve abortion rights, and from a half-dozen other states, including Kentucky and Ohio, which had followed suit.

Then again, Missouri was one of the most conservative states to put abortion rights to an electoral test since Dobbs. The last time a Democratic Presidential candidate had won Missouri was in 1996, and, this time, Donald Trump was certain to defeat Kamala Harris and lead a Republican sweep of statewide offices. Josh Hawley, the state’s senior U.S. senator, was insisting, against all evidence, that Amendment 3 wasn’t about abortion but, rather, about providing gender-affirming care to minors. He falsely called it “an effort to come into our schools, behind your backs, without your knowledge, to tell our kids that there’s something wrong with them and to give them drugs that will sterilize them for life.”

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