Missouri Lawmakers Are Trying To Roll Back An Anti-Discrimination Law That Protects Reproductive Health Choices
A bill is bouncing back and forth between the Missouri House and Senate as lawmakers try to settle on new abortion restriction provisions. The bill would effectively roll back an anti-discrimination law passed in February that protected women’s reproductive health choices in St. Louis. It also would test the limits of states’ rights to regulate abortion against the Supreme Court’s mandate that lawmakers not create “undue burden or substantial obstacle” for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.
The House has pushed to add back in several items the Senate removed from the bill to avoid a Democratic filibuster. One would make it a crime for an abortion clinic to interfere with emergency medical personnel, according to KWMU St. Louis. That provision refers, according to the Associated Press, to past occasional requests from a St. Louis abortion clinic that ambulances not use their lights or sirens out of concern of causing alarm. A second was a quibble between the House and Senate on whether the state attorney general alone should be empowered to enforce abortion laws, or if local prosecutors could be included in the chain of command.
The House has pushed to add back in several items the Senate removed from the bill to avoid a Democratic filibuster. One would make it a crime for an abortion clinic to interfere with emergency medical personnel, according to KWMU St. Louis. That provision refers, according to the Associated Press, to past occasional requests from a St. Louis abortion clinic that ambulances not use their lights or sirens out of concern of causing alarm. A second was a quibble between the House and Senate on whether the state attorney general alone should be empowered to enforce abortion laws, or if local prosecutors could be included in the chain of command.