After Missouri banned nearly all abortions in 2022, Valerie Weaver, a certified registered nurse anesthetist in Kansas City, noticed a troubling change in some of her pregnant patients. They were arriving sicker, with complications such as infections, blood clots or other issues while waiting for treatment. Some required general anesthesia rather than an epidural or spinal, increasing the risks of their care. Weaver said the problem was particularly acute in situations such as a woman’s water breaking before her fetus could survive outside the womb. “That law made it so where we couldn’t care for the mother until she had an active threat against her life,” she said.
In 2024, Missouri became the first state to overturn an abortion ban at the ballot box. Weaver said her patients now have a choice they lacked under the ban: End a pregnancy before an emergency develops, even if there is still a fetal heartbeat, or continue the pregnancy. But Weaver fears those conditions could return after the Nov. 3 election.
Amendment 3 would repeal the reproductive rights amendment Missouri voters approved in 2024 and reinstate an abortion ban with exceptions for medical emergencies, as well as certain fetal anomalies and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest within the first 12 weeks. It would also enact a constitutional ban on gender-affirming care for minors, which is already banned in state statute.
Supporters insist those exceptions would protect women who need abortions. But some physicians, attorneys and patients who experienced Missouri’s previous ban say the exceptions could prove difficult to implement in practice, leaving doctors uncertain about when they can intervene.
Medical emergencies and fetal anomalies
The first TV ad for Stop the Ban, the campaign to defeat Amendment 3, features a Missouri mother who faced a dangerous pregnancy complication. “I needed an abortion to save my life,” she said. “And now politicians are trying to take that right away from us.” Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway in a recent interview hosted by the Family Research Council, a conservative nonprofit, called the No on 3 campaign messaging “a flat out lie.”
Dr. Sarah Florence, a board-certified family medicine physician from Fenton who spoke in support of the amendment at the Midwest March for Life in April, said the language isn’t written to sacrifice women’s health. “Sometimes the mother must be separated from the baby in order for her life to be saved, and sometimes for the baby’s life to be saved as well,” she told The Independent this week. “But that never, ever, in medicine, requires the additional step of intentionally killing the child first.”
Molly Duane, litigation director at Amplify Legal, the litigation arm of Abortion in America, said cases in other states show why exceptions likely not work as supporters intend. Duane represents women in several states who she said were denied or delayed lifesaving pregnancy care because of an abortion ban. The proposed language in Amendment 3, Duane said, “is an absolute disaster zone.” “It has all of the problems that the abortion bans in other states where I have litigated have that have caused people to be denied care for ectopic pregnancy, miscarriages, fatal fetal diagnoses, conditions like pre-eclampsia, water breaking prematurely, bleeding and septic infections,” she said. “It has all of those problems, plus more.”
