Abortion opponents are lying about Missouri's Amendment 3 to avoid saying what they really believe

They make things up to claim A3 is "too extreme," but don't defend Missouri's current ban

I hope you’ll read my column for the Missouri Independent: “I met an abortion opponent at the park. He said what the politicians won’t about Amendment 3.”

Since the interaction that I wrote about, people have shared more literature with me from various parts of the state distributed by opponents of Amendment 3, the ballot initiative that will decriminalize abortion in Missouri if voters approve it November 5th. There is clearly a concerted effort to lie to people about what Amendment 3 says coming from organizations who don’t want to openly defend Missouri’s total abortion ban.

Lit being distributed in Columbia says that Amendment 3 “legalizes painful, late-term abortion.” To which I reacted: “No kidding late-term abortion is painful, you monsters.”

The state is not positioned to determine whether it is more painful to terminate a doomed pregnancy at 25 weeks or to carry a baby you know will not survive for months, go through labor, and then watch your baby suffocate to death in your arms.

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but: late abortion is not a problem. We do not need a law to prohibit something no one wants. We need to legalize early abortion and we need better access to third trimester abortion—a specialty few doctors in the country are trained to provide. All fearmongering about late abortion is an attempt to exploit the tragedies of those losing wanted pregnancies, in order to keep early abortion a crime in this state.

It is particularly distressing to me that so many of the lies about Amendment 3—which, at their core, are ugly claims about the morality and competence of women—are coming from Catholic dioceses and publications. I’m grateful to kindred spirit “Leigh” who shared her feelings with the KC Star about the letter that she and 124,000 Catholics received from the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph: “Letter from Kansas City Catholic Diocese has 'blatantly false' information on abortion measure.”

According to U.S. Catholic authorities, birth control is a sin, IVF is a sin, and the law should require a woman to carry every pre-embryo to term. But this is not what they say to the public, or even their own parishioners, because too few people and too few Catholics believe that.

To argue honestly against Amendment 3, they would need to say: “Missouri’s total ban on abortion from the moment of conception is good and we should keep it.” Everything else is a dishonest distraction aimed at imposing by law a morality that most Catholics reject.

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The full text of Amendment 3 (only one page long) is here. You can donate to support at Missourians for Constitutional Freedom.