Despite Missouri decisively voting to protect a right to abortion in November, there’s no low to which anti-abortion officials in the state won’t go. Since February 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) has been leading a legal war on Planned Parenthood Great Plains, baselessly accusing them of trafficking minors out of state to access abortion while the state’s total ban was still in effect. Bailey’s evidence is a highly edited video from the anti-abortion extremist group Project Veritas, where an undercover anti-abortion activist poses as an uncle trying to help his underage niece get an abortion out of state. In the video, a Planned Parenthood employee tells him this is possible. Bailey’s case remains ongoing, even though, as of February, abortion is legal in Missouri again.
Most recently, Bailey subpoenaed the Missouri Abortion Fund to get them to submit years’ worth of private records. His office claims to be seeking communications between MAF and PPGP for evidence of PPGP illegally transporting minors to seek out-of-state abortion care, even though MAF isn’t even a party in the case—no one in the Project Veritas video even mentions them.
Thankfully, on Monday, Boone County Judge J. Hasbrouck Jacobs temporarily blocked Bailey from accessing MAF’s records, with a permanent ruling on the matter tabled for a later date, according to the Missouri Independent. However, Jacobs also denied Planned Parenthood’s requests for Bailey’s witch hunt to be thrown out altogether, even as an attorney for PPGP pointed out that, now that abortion is legal in the state, Missouri’s case against them should no longer be applicable.
Earlier this year, Missouri Republicans introduced a bill to establish a state-run registry to track pregnancies and identify and monitor pregnant people “at risk for seeking an abortion.” The bill remains under consideration in the legislature. In 2019, the state’s health director had to resign after he was caught keeping a spreadsheet of Planned Parenthood patients’ menstrual cycles. So it seems clear that Bailey’s efforts to access records of everyone the MAF has ever helped are part of the state’s broader, long-running effort to surveil and terrorize abortion seekers.
At a hearing on Monday, MAF accused Missouri of an “abuse of power” that’s “caused substantial and unnecessary expenses,” all while “Missourians still rely on us to make abortion accessible.” MAF’s executive director, Jess Lambrecht, told Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter that she expects legal fees “will eat at least at this point a full month of patient coverage,” or around $50,000 that could help fund abortion.
The organization further estimates that it would take almost 3,000 hours to sift through 35,000 records requests—hours in which they wouldn’t be able to help abortion seekers or fundraise and organize for abortion access. MAF is run by just two full-time and one part-time staff members, as well as volunteers. The goal—as is the goal with all obviously baseless and legally dubious lawsuits against abortion funds—is obstruction of their vital work.
Bailey is pursuing all of this under the guise of protecting children, taking a page from the broader anti-abortion movement’s playbook. In the Project Veritas video published in 2024, when abortion was still banned in Missouri, the fake uncle asks for help accessing abortion care for his made-up, underage niece. Clinic staff tell him he can go to their affiliate clinics in Kansas, where he can “bypass” parental consent requirements. The man asks the clinic workers if minors traveling out-of-state for abortion is common, and one of the employees tells him this happens “every day.” A spokesperson for PPGP told the Missouri Independent the video is “heavily doctored and edited.” But even still, no aspect of this—telling someone they can travel out-of-state for abortion care—is illegal. (Ever heard of a little thing called the First Amendment???) Missouri law at the time stated that “no one shall intentionally cause aid or assist a minor to obtain an abortion.” But PPGP points out they don’t provide any form of transportation directly to any of their patients, regardless of age. Plus, the Planned Parenthood employees didn’t even discuss transportation with the “uncle.”
Nonetheless, anti-abortion officials have increasingly zeroed in on accusing abortion providers and advocates of “trafficking” minors. Tennessee and Idaho have both enacted “abortion trafficking” laws that criminalize adults who help minors travel for abortion care without parental consent. Both laws are currently being challenged in court and parts of Idaho’s law were scaled back by a federal judge in November.
Earlier this year, Montana Republicans also introduced a bill to criminalize abortion-related travel, not just for minors; the bill wielded fetal personhood to charge abortion travelers and those who help them with “trafficking” their unborn fetus or embryo. Montana’s bill was eventually revoked in the wake of mass outrage, but not before exposing that it’s not just minors—Republicans are coming after the right to travel for abortion, for everyone.
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