JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – Missouri is one step closer to repealing the “right” to abortion recently added to the state constitution.

Last November, Missouri residents voted 51.6 percent to 48.5 percent to add to the state constitution Amendment 3, which establishes a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” that applies to “all matters relating to (so-called) reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions.” It prohibits the legislature from banning abortion until “fetal viability” and after “viability” if an abortionist claims that killing a woman’s unborn child is deemed “needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.”

The amendment effectively invalidated the state’s near-total abortion ban, which only allowed abortion when allegedly necessary to avoid the mother’s death or “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

Now, the Columbia Missourian reported that the Missouri House Children and Families Committee voted Wednesday to advance another proposed constitutional amendment, which would ban abortion except for rape and incest in the first trimester and medical emergencies throughout pregnancy. It would also ban taxpayer funding for abortion or youth gender “transitions” – the latter of which, critics say, may run afoul of the legal requirement that amendments confine themselves to a single subject.

If the amendment makes it through the legislature, it would then have to be submitted to the voters for final approval.

“If the voters had known that Amendment 3 would prevent parents from even knowing, let alone giving consent to their daughters,” Campaign Life Missouri director Samuel Lee testified in support of the effort. “I think the voters deserve a chance to vote on this again.”

Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.

Such amendments have been the abortion lobby’s most potent tactic. Up until 2024, it had consistent success since the overturn of Roe v. Wade using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public. 

After 2020, pro-lifers either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, Kansas, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box as well as consternation within the Republican Party over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.

Ten states had such amendments on the ballot in November 2024. Pro-lifers defeated pro-abortion ballot initiatives in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, breaking the abortion lobby’s two-year winning streak, but amendments to embed abortion “rights” in state constitutions prevailed in the remaining states.