Advocate for reproductive rights in Missouri has beaten back a last-ditch effort by Republican officials to stop voters from having their say on abortion in November. On Tuesday afternoon, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered that a proposed amendment to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution will remain on this year’s ballot.

The ruling ensures that Missourians will have the opportunity to vote amendment 3, which would establish a right to “reproductive freedom” – defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion and healthcare during pregnancy. If passed, the amendment will set a high legal bar for how the state can regulate abortion before “viability” — the hard-to-determine moment when a fetus is likely to survive outside the womb. After profitability, the action would let the state ban abortionwith the exception of protecting the life and health of the pregnant patient.

The decision caps a roller coaster of a year for reproductive rights advocates in Missouri, who faced hurdle after hurdle to get the measure on the ballot in November. Supporters gathered more than 380,000 signatures this spring, bypassing a legislature dominated by hard-line abortion foes that passed the state’s current, nearly total abortion ban. A St. Louis University/YouGov survey of 900 likely voters in mid-August found that 52 percent supported Amendment 3 and 34 percent opposed it.

“Today’s decision is a victory for both direct democracy and reproductive freedom in Missouri,” Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the change, said in a statement. “This fight wasn’t just about this amendment — it was about defending the integrity of the initiative-making process and making sure Missourians can shape their future directly.”

Ballot initiatives have become one central part of the strategy to restore and expand abortion rights afterRoe v. Wade era. They are also key to the Democrats’ efforts turn out voters in battleground states in this year’s close presidential election. The right to abortion is populareven in solid red state; The pro-choice side has won all seven abortion-related measures on state ballots since 2022.

That has prompted Republican officials in GOP-dominated states including Arkansas, Florida and Nebraska to go all out this year to prevent abortion rights measures from getting to the ballot in the first place — filing lawsuits, delaying or invalidating petitions and spreading misinformation.

In Missouri, Tuesday’s ruling comes in response to a last-minute lawsuit by two Republican state lawmakers, Representative Hannah Kelly and Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman, who are working with anti-abortion activists and lawyers from the Thomas More Society. a law firm aligned with conservative Catholics. They argued that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft should never have certified Amendment 3 because it did not specify which state laws it would repeal. (Missouri law requires initiative petitions to “include any part of existing law or constitution that would be repealed by the measure.”) court filingthey argued that the Amendment 3 campaign “deceived potential signers” and that the measure “would have far-reaching effects,” including on Missouri’s rules on human cloning and single-sex bathrooms.

Supporters of change replied that no state laws would be automatically repealed. Instead, advocates would have to file lawsuits challenging the anti-abortion laws, with judges making the final decisions about which violate the new constitutional amendment. “This is another example of someone fumbling and trying to rein in a campaign that has serious momentum,” said Mallory Schwartz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri. part of the Coalition for Amendment 3. “What they’re really doing is trying to deny people access to direct democracy.”

The Missouri Supreme Court decision cancels a surprise ruling by Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh on Friday night he declared that the vote on the amendment should be called off – although he left time for an appeal. Judge Limbaugh, a cousin of the late conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, where appointed to the bench by his former boss, Republican Governor Mike Parson, less than five weeks ago.

Ashcroft defended his certification in a hearing before Limbaugh. But after Friday’s decision, Ashcroft dispatched the abortion rights campaign a letter announcing that he himself was decertifying Amendment 3. “Upon further review in light of the circuit court’s ruling, I have determined that the amendment is deficient,” he wrote.

In its Tuesday decision, the Missouri Supreme Court Ashcroft ordered to recertify Amendment 3 for the vote, ruling that the deadline for him to issue a certification decision had passed.

For Ashcroft and other Missouri Republicans, the decision is yet another rebuke in a long and exhausting campaign to keep the amendment off the ballot. In at least four previous lawsuits, Missouri courts have struck down attempts by state officials to disrupt the amendment.

First, State Attorney Andrew Bailey, who is running for re-election, held up the initiative for months by pushing a baseless theory that the initiative could cost the state billions in federal Medicaid funding and declining to rubber-stamp a cost estimate prepared by the state auditor. After a legal battle, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Bailey to do so stop stonewalling.

Then last fall, Kelly and Coleman — the same lawmakers behind the latest lawsuit — seized on Bailey’s false theory about Medicaid funding and sued the state auditor over his cost estimate. They were also struck down by the courts, which found the cost estimate “fair and adequate.”

Meanwhile, the Ashcroft-an outspoken abortion opponent whose job requires him to produce neutral summaries of ballot initiatives — issued summaries that argue the measure would allow “dangerous, unregulated and unrestricted abortion.” In October last year, an decided the Court of Appeal these summaries were “filled with political partisan language.” A circuit court judge wrote about them in full.

But Ashcroft did not learn his lesson. Last month, on the same day he certified the amendment for the ballot, he issued “fair ballot language” to be posted at polling places that made a slew of false claims, including that the measure would prohibit legal recourse against “anyone who performs an abortion and injures or kills the the pregnant women.” On Thursday, Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker thrown out Ashcroft’s description, calling it “unfair, inadequate, inaccurate and misleading.”

Tuesday’s judgment in the Supreme Court is a decisive win for the fight to expand abortion rights in Missouri, which has some of those most restrictive laws in the country. Even before the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, only one clinic remained open in the state, providing less than 100 abortions annually. Hours after the fall Romestate officials invoked a dormant law that made it a crime to provide abortions in virtually all cases.

Missouri isn’t the only place where state officials have made last-ditch efforts to block or blunt voter referendums on abortion. On Monday, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments in a trio of lawsuits over dueling amendments – one to protect abortion until viability and another to ban abortion after the first trimester. Argument focused on whether the protection amendment violates a state rule that requires ballot measures to cover only a single topic, according to Nebraska Examiner.

Last month in Arkansas, the state Supreme Court threw out thousands of signatures in favor of an abortion-rights measure, ruling that organizers had failed to submit education certificates for their paid workers in the proper format, It was reported by the Associated Press. The decision upheld state officials’ decision to disqualify the measure from the ballot.

In Florida, the state attorney general lost a lawsuit that argued an amendment to protect abortion rights until viable was “too complicated” for voters to understand. But last month, the state Supreme Court approved a tax impact statement for Amendment 4 written with the help of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025. Meanwhile, the state Agency for Health Care Administration exposed a website Thursday full of false claims about the initiative, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported. And the Florida Department of State is reportedly investigating 36,000 voter signatures submitted by change organizers.

As it stands Tuesday, ten states will vote on abortion-related measures on the November ballot. Missouri is one of two where voters can overturn an almost total abortion ban.

Sophie Hurwitz contributed reporting.