The Missouri Supreme Court rejected a bid on Tuesday to throw out a question on the ballot in November that will ask voters whether to establish a right to abortion in the state Constitution.
The seven-member court handed down a one-page ruling less than three hours before the state’s deadline for printing ballots for absentee voters, capping a furious few days of legal maneuvers, as anti-abortion groups and state Republicans made a last-ditch effort to stop the ballot amendment.
The measure is one of ten in states across the country that would establish protections for abortion like those that were identified in the federal constitution in Roe v. Wade, which the United States Supreme Court overturned in June 2022.
In the two years since that reversal, abortion rights groups have prevailed in seven abortion-related ballot measures across the country, including in conservative-leaning states like Kansas and Ohio. In Missouri, they collected more than 380,159 signatures on petitions to place the measure on the ballot, a record for any initiative in the state and more than twice the number required.
With the court’s reversal of Roe motivating Democrats to the polls, anti-abortion groups and Republicans have fought to stop the measures from appearing before voters. The Arizona Supreme Court last month rejected a bid to strike the question from the ballot there. Nebraska’s Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday on a similar bid, and a trial seeking to strike the measure in South Dakota is scheduled for late this month.
Charles Hatfield, a lawyer for the abortion rights groups, suggested in court Tuesday morning that the justices were deciding about more than just abortion. “This is a big deal,” he said. “The court will send a message today about whether, in our little corner of the democracy, the government will honor the will of the people, or will have it snatched away.”
Anti-abortion groups had tried to block the measure by arguing that proponents of the ballot measure had failed to meet constitutional requirements that the people who sign ballot-measure petitions be fully informed of the proposal’s legal ramifications.
“These requirements protect voters,” their lawyer, Mary Catherine Martin of the Thomas More Society, told the seven justices. “They do not burden the state of Missouri’s voters, they require them to be fully informed in order to properly exercise their right under the initiative process.”