On Tuesday, February 23, the Missouri state legislature will hear five abortion-restriction bills. House bills 2068, 2069, 2070, and 2071 (R-Franklin) and HB 2371 (R-Koenig). These bills, along with SB 644 which awaits debate on the senate floor after quickly passing out of committee, ride on the coattails of the misleading videos released last summer by the Center for Medical Progress questioning Planned Parenthood’s medical ethics, allegations of which the organization has since been repeatedly cleared both at the state and federal levels.
These bills, commonly known as TRAP bills or “Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers,” are predicated on the deceptive intention of enhancing women’s health and safety. Their impact, however, runs counter to this claim. TRAP laws impose an increasingly unmanageable regulatory burden upon abortion providers, completely failing to impact the safety of this legal medical procedure that already has a complication rate of less than 1%.
Missouri follows a nationwide trend in state-level legislative attacks on abortion providers, which has surged since the release of the CMP’s smear campaign. One such bill, contested for its unlawful imposition of an “undue burden” on Texas women, moves to the Supreme Court next month, where the now eight-seat panel of justices will make a precedent-setting decision for the future litigation of abortion restrictions bills. The “undue burden” language originates from the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case of 1992, in which the Supreme Court found that both the purpose and the impact of a regulation must be considered, and legitimate, to pass the undue burden standard. Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt (formerly Cole) will write its page in the legacy of landmark abortion-related rulings in the highest court of the country on March 2, 2016.
Anti-choice legislation has become increasingly deceptive in its approach, aiming to skirt the constitutionality of abortion by proposing restrictions that make it not illegal but rather geographically, economically and otherwise infeasible for millions of women (especially low-income women) to realistically access abortion. This time, the Supreme Court must make a finding pertaining to the “undue burden” provision not just on the grounds of the expressed purpose of restrictive legislation but rather, as the finding of Planned Parenthood v. Casey intended, on the grounds of its actual purpose. In the case of TRAP bills, it has become very clear that women’s health is not the goal; cutting off abortion access is.
Staunch anti-choice advocates in the Missouri state legislature have made it abundantly clear, especially recently, that the TRAP laws and Planned Parenthood investigations seek primarily to shut down abortion providers. As a result, the stakes for women, and for the state of Missouri in particular, are incredibly high. If the Supreme Court comes down on the side of abortion providers in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case next month, politicians will actually have to start proving that their bills authentically aim to, and realistically will, benefit women’s health. Alas, Missouri politicians who have proposed bills like the ones being heard tomorrow could face a legal firestorm for their relentless efforts to circumvent the word of the Supreme Court.
Originally posted by Sarah Nesbitt, ACLU Public Policy Intern on February 22, 2016.