KWOS Jefferson City News Authority
(AP) — Abortion-rights advocates asked a judge on Monday to rewrite what they call misleading descriptions of several constitutional amendments on abortion that voters could see on Missouri’s 2024 ballot.
Missouri is among several states, including Ohio, where abortion opponents are fighting efforts to ensure or restore access to the procedure following the fall of Roe v. Wade last year.
In part, one of the Missouri petitions would amend the state’s constitution to ban government infringement on the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care.”
Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who is running for governor in 2024, summarized the amendments as allowing “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth, without requiring a medical license or potentially being subject to medical malpractice.”
The Missouri judge can approve Ashcroft’s summaries or rewrite the descriptions for voters. In either case, a resolution would allow the petitioners to begin collecting voters signatures that are needed to get the measures on the ballot.
Also on Monday, a lawyer for abortion opponents revived arguments that the state auditor’s cost estimates for the measures were misleadingly low because they did not account for a potential loss in property and sales tax revenue as a result of lower birth rates.
