The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that an amendment to restore right to abortion in the state will be on the ballot.
The proposed measure would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, barring government interference with the procedure. If passed, it would overturn the state’s 2022 law near-total ban on abortionThe court issued its decision hours before a Tuesday deadline to make changes to the November ballot.
State Supreme Court justices ordered Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state, to put the measure back on the ballot. He had withdrawn it Monday after a county circuit judge ruled Friday.
The order also ordered Ashcroft, an abortion opponent, to “take all necessary steps to ensure that this proposition appears on the ballot.”
The court’s full opinion on the case was not immediately released Tuesday.
Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the campaign that supports the measure, welcomed the decision.
“Missourians overwhelmingly support reproductive rights, including access to abortion, birth control, and miscarriage care,” campaign manager Rachel Sweet said in a statement. “Now they will have the opportunity to enshrine these protections in the Missouri Constitution on November 5.”
Mary Catherine Martin, a lawyer for a group of Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents suing to strike down the amendment, told the Supreme Court justices during hurried arguments Tuesday that the initiative petition “misled voters” by failing to list all the abortion-restricting laws it would actually repeal.
The amendment is part of a national push to get voters to weigh in on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Missouri banned nearly all abortions immediately afterward.
Eight other states are considering amending their constitutions to guarantee abortion rights, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota. Most of them would guarantee the right to abortion until the fetus is viable and would allow it later for health reasons, as Missouri proposes.
New York also has a referendum measure that supporters say would protect abortion rights, though there is dispute over its impact.
Voting on this polarizing issue could attract more people pollswhich could impact presidential outcomes in key states, control of Congress and the outcome of hotly contested state elections. Missouri Democrats, for example, are hoping to get a boost from abortion rights supporters in the November election.
Legal battles have erupted across the country over whether voters should decide these issues, and over the exact language used on ballots and explanatory materials. In August, Arkansas’s highest court upheld a decision not to include an abortion-rights initiative on the state’s November ballot, agreeing with election officials that the group behind the measure had failed to properly file paperwork about the signature gatherers it had hired.
Voters in the seven states that have had abortion questions on their ballots since Roe was overturned sided with supporters of abortion rights.
