Attorneys Allege Petition to Amend Constitution Violates State Law
Editor’s note. This is adapted from a post found here.
In a lawsuit filed on August 22, 2024, on behalf of state lawmakers and concerned individuals, Thomas More Society attorneys are challenging the inclusion of proposed Amendment 3 on the November ballot.
The filing alleges that the initiative petition was erroneously certified by Missouri Secretary of State John Ashcroft, because it runs afoul of the Missouri Constitution and state statutes. Amendment 3, also known as the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative” seeks to amend the state constitution to include an unlimited, new “super-right,” called the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” In the proposed amendment, this term is left largely undefined but affects “all matters relating to reproductive health care.”
By failing to specify the laws and constitutional provisions that it would repeal, directly or by implication, the initiative petition that led to proposed Amendment 3 violates both the state’s constitution and its laws. Missouri Revised Statute Section 116.050 requires that signers of an initiative petition be informed of “[t]he full and correct text” of the initiative, which must “[i]nclude all sections of existing law or of the constitution which would be repealed by the measure.”
Missourians signing the petition to put Amendment 3 on the ballot did not see this information, despite the clear legal mandate requiring such information to be listed, making those signatures and the petition illegal.
“The petition proposing Amendment 3 violated both state law and the Missouri Constitution, so the Secretary of State was wrong to certify it,” said Mary Catherine Martin, Thomas More Society Senior Counsel. “Missouri’s laws require drafters to disclose the effects of initiative petitions on other laws and limit the effect of a proposed amendment to one subject, to protect Missouri voters from being defrauded by artfully drafting them into approving something that has hidden effects. Amendment 3 is rife with hidden effects. Its main provision creates a totally novel, and limitless, ‘super-right’ ranking higher than life, speech, religion, equal protection, and due process. This would require the courts, when making decisions relating to reproduction, to place this ‘super-right’ above the interests of anyone else, and even of society as a whole.”
The lawsuit is filed on behalf of Missouri State Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman, pro-life advocate Kathy Forck, State Representative Hannah Kelly, and Our Lady’s Inn President and CEO Peggy Forrest. It details that, as proposed, Amendment 3’s new “super-right” to “reproductive freedom” would repeal essentially all of Missouri’s state statutes and constitutional provisions regulating reproductive care and technologies, including all existing regulation of abortion, cloning, IVF for stem cell research, gender transition surgery, and genital mutilation.
That repeal would include the state’s constitutional amendment banning human cloning and IVF for the purposes of stem cell research, the “Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act,” and the “Infant’s Protection Act”—which is the state’s partial-birth abortion law. Additionally, the proposed Amendment 3 would eradicate state laws that protect unborn children at viability and from abortion based on discrimination (such race, sex, and Down syndrome), and Missouri’s prohibition on the abortion of late-term, pain-capable, unborn children.
“We are asking the court to reverse the certification of Amendment 3 because Missourians have a legal right to an electoral process that follows the law, and the process forcing Amendment 3 on Missouri has not done so,” added Martin. “It is a scorched earth campaign, razing our state lawbooks of critical protections for vulnerable women and children, the innocent unborn, parents, and any taxpayer who does not want their money to pay for abortion and other extreme decisions that this Amendment defines as ‘care.’ To be clear: under our initiative petition process, Missourians are free to tie their hands in this way, but the Constitution and statutes require that they know that they are doing so.”