A lawsuit seeking to strike down Missouri laws that restrict access to abortion for minors was thrown out Tuesday, Oct. 7, on technical grounds.
Jackson County Circuit Judge Sarah Castle determined that the nonprofit that filed the litigation, Right By You, did not have the standing to sue. The lawsuit targeted a requirement that minors get parental consent before an abortion and a ban on anyone aiding or assisting minors who are seeking an abortion.
Castle didn’t draw any conclusions in her Oct. 7 decision about whether the reproductive rights amendment approved by voters last year renders either law unconstitutional.
Missouri’s parental consent law requires a minor attempting to access abortion receive at least one parent’s consent. The other parent must also be notified. If that’s not possible, they can also ask a judge to bypass the requirement.
“Today’s victory ensures that Missouri’s parental consent laws will continue to safeguard young girls, hold abortion providers accountable and uphold the values of Missouri families for generations to come,” Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said in a statement Wednesday, Oct. 8.
Right By You is a nonprofit that helps young people navigate pregnancy decisions, including by increasing access to and awareness around contraceptives, prenatal care, abortion, parenting and adoption. In its lawsuit, the nonprofit also asked the court to allow the group to begin funding and arranging logistics for minors seeking abortions, including transportation, hotel and child care costs.
But Castle on Oct. 7 determined Right By You, which has one employee in Illinois and some volunteers who live in Missouri, didn’t have the ability to sue because it’s “fiscally sponsored” by a nonprofit incorporated in California. She dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, leaving the door open for the suit to be filed again.
“Young Missourians will continue to be coerced, isolated, and stigmatized for simply choosing to end a pregnancy until the abortion restrictions targeting them are lifted,” Stephanie Kraft Sheley, Right By You’s founder and director, said in a statement Wednesday. “Missouri’s youth deserve better than being left on their own just to access basic health care.”
Kraft Sheley said attorneys may re-file the lawsuit. In the meantime, she said, Right By You will continue providing young people with information on abortion and contraception through the nonprofit’s text line.
Castle heard arguments in early September after the attorney general’s office asked the court to dismiss the case.
Peter Donohue, an assistant attorney general involved in the lawsuit, told Castle that the judicial bypass measures in place are sufficient.
“It’s kind of wild the plaintiffs think that in cases where judicial bypass is insufficient, that they want basically no circumstance in which parents would be notified of their minor children having an abortion, essentially,” Donohue said.
Allison Zimmer, with the Lawyering Project, argued on behalf of Right By You that the lawsuit was part of a larger effort to broadly protect reproductive rights.
“Just to go back to what is at stake here again, this is about the threat to the right to reproductive freedom,” Zimmer said. “A constitutional right for people in Missouri after the November election … “
Thirty-eight states, including Missouri, require at least some parental involvement for minors seeking abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group.
“It makes sense that folks that are in healthy relationships with their children have this instinct that they would want their children to come to them, but a law that forces that to happen in every case is not the solution to that problem,” Kraft Sheley previously told The Independent. “Because it’s not possible for a law to legislate a healthy family dynamic.”
Kraft Sheley is also a co-founder of What’s Next, a reproductive justice group made up of organizers and activists who previously called for a constitutional amendment to appear on the Missouri ballot with no restrictions on abortion.
Last year, the coalition called on the state’s major reproductive rights groups to challenge Missouri’s parental consent law.
After getting no response, Kraft Sheley filed her own lawsuit, noting that current policy does not clearly state how or if minors in state custody or in the foster care system can access abortion through the current parental consent law.
An answer to the question of constitutionality may instead come from a separate lawsuit filed in February 2024 in Cole County by the attorney general’s office alleging Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which oversees clinics in Kansas City and Columbia, illegally transported minors out of state for abortions.
The lawsuit relied on a staged video filmed and edited by Project Veritas, a conservative news organization. In the footage, a man working with Project Veritas goes to a Kansas City area Planned Parenthood and pretends to have a 13-year-old niece who he says needs an abortion. The employee tells the man that Planned Parenthood can help the girl get an abortion in Kansas.
Planned Parenthood has said the lawsuit should be dropped because the video was based on a hypothetical situation and because abortion is now legal.
“I find that the right to reproductive freedom initiative does not address the issue of parental consent,” Boone County Judge J. Hasbrouck Jacobs said in April. “And because of that, I’m going to deny the motion to dismiss.”
The next hearing date has not yet been set.
Missourians in November narrowly voted to enshrine the right to reproductive health care in the state constitution. This amendment includes a provision that prohibits the government from discriminating “against persons providing or obtaining reproductive health care or assisting another person in doing so.”
The amendment does allow the government to legislate abortion access if compelling governmental interest exists.
A new amendment proposed by the Republican legislature is set to appear on the November 2026 ballot. If passed, it will repeal the reproductive rights amendment and ban nearly all abortions, with limited exceptions for survivors and for medical emergencies.
This story was first published at missouriindependent.com.
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