Missouri State Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R) introduced a bill akin to Texas’s draconian SB8 law misleadingly titled “Empower Women, Promote Life Act” (HB1987) that seeks to ban nearly all abortions in Missouri and also grant bounty hunters (aka “private citizens”) privileges to sue abortion providers, doctors, and anyone else enabling an act of abortion to take place. The bill is likely to pass sometime next year, as Missouri has a GOP supermajority in both the State House and Senate.
Kurt Erickson at St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
JEFFERSON CITY — A Missouri lawmaker introduced legislation Thursday that would ban nearly all abortions in the state, mirroring a new Texas law that could gut the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that legalized the procedure.
Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, R-Arnold, who is running for a seat in the state Senate, wants to prohibit the termination of a pregnancy once cardiac activity is detected in an embryo, usually around six weeks and before some women even know they are pregnant.
Her proposal also bypasses state officials who typically enforce laws and deputizes private citizens to sue clinics, doctors and anyone else who facilitates an abortion after the cardiac cutoff.
It also would attempt to further limit funding to the state’s lone abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, which already has taken steps to assist Missouri women seeking abortions by opening a clinic across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Illinois.
“We must pass comprehensive pro-life legislation that defunds Planned Parenthood by enacting the Empower Women, Promote Life Act,” Coleman said in a statement. “This important piece of legislation will provide protection to children born in a botched abortion, ban the inhumane practice of dismemberment abortions, and follows Texas’ lead by providing a civil course of action for those who break the law by performing, aiding or abetting unlawful abortions.”
NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s Twitter:
I got some news for you, Mrs. Coleman and others who want to seek SB8-style bans be enacted into the Show-Me State: abcdefu!