In a grave slap in the face to women today on International Women’s Day, Missouri State Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R) proposed abillthat effectively bans Missourians from crossing out-of-state to get abortions (especially to Illinois and Kansas). Missourians who seek abortion services out-of-state could face lawsuits from private citizens, along with staffers and doctors at reproductive health clinics who help Missourians obtain abortions.
Coleman is the same lawmaker who proposed a Texas SB8-style law for the Show-Me State, and is running for the Missouri State Senate.
This is part of her extremist anti-abortion crusade that she seeks to enact on Missourians as part of the right-wing war on abortion access.
Caroline Kitchener at Washington Post:
The pattern emerges whenever a Republican-led state imposes new restrictions on abortion: People seeking the procedure cross state lines to find treatment in places with less-restrictive laws.
Now, a prominent antiabortion lawmaker in Missouri, from where thousands of residents have traveled to next-door Illinois to receive abortions since Missouri passed one of the country’s strictest abortion laws in 2019, believes she has found a solution.
An unusual new provision, introduced by state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R), would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident obtain an abortion out of state, using the novel legal strategy behind the restrictive law in Texas that since September has banned abortions in that state after six weeks of pregnancy.
Coleman has attached the measure as an amendment to several abortion-related bills that have made it through committee and are waiting to be heard on the floor of the House of Representatives.
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The measure would target anyone even tangentially involved in an abortion performed on a Missouri resident, including the hotline staffers who make the appointments, the marketing representatives who advertise out-of-state clinics, and the Illinois and Kansas-based doctors who handle the procedure. Her amendment also would make it illegal to manufacture, transport, possess or distribute abortion pills in Missouri.
David Badash at The New Civil Rights Movement:
A far right Missouri state representative and pro-Trump acolyte is using a Texas vigilante legal theory in a novel manner to effectively ban women from leaving her state to obtain abortions in nearby Illinois – or any other state.
State Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, who last year made headlines for wanting to name a portion. of a highway after the disgraced former president, is filing a bill that allows anyone in the country to sue if a Missouri resident leaves the state to access abortion services.
Rep. Coleman’s legislation “would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident obtain an abortion out of state, using the novel legal strategy behind the restrictive law in Texas that since September has banned abortions in that state after six weeks of pregnancy,” The Washington Post reports.
The Post calls Coleman a “prominent antiabortion lawmaker” but she’s actually the former attorney for a far right-wing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ group, the Thomas More Society.
Kitchener on Twitter:
In conservative-run states, dangerous and extreme proposals like this are starting to get traction and will be the norm once Roe gets neutered or overturned in the Dobbs case.