Featuring Pamela Merrit, MSFC Executive Director.

On election night in 2024, Missouri voters became the first in the country to lift their state’s total abortion ban, with a ballot measure meant to enshrine in the state’s constitution the right to end a pregnancy. More than 1.5 million Missourians—motivated by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade two years before, a ruling that had triggered the Missouri ban—fought back with their votes. (The ban allowed only a narrow exception for life-threatening emergencies.) Today, if you go online looking for information about how to get an abortion in the state, you will come across numerous stories announcing the victory and describing the return of abortion services: “Abortions Resume In Missouri”; “Inside KC Clinic For First Abortion Since End Of Missouri Ban”; “Planned Parenthood St. Louis Resumes Surgical Abortions”; “Abortion Returns To Columbia, Opening Access For Mid-Missouri For First Time Since 2018.” Abortion Action Missouri, one of the lead groups that had advanced the campaign for Amendment 3, as the measure was called, pinned a jubilant post to its Instagram: Missourians had “ended the abortion ban.”…