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The Muddled 2007 Legislative Session
by Jim Cole, State Legislative Chair
On the last day of the 2007 session, the Missouri Legislature passed an important pro-life bill, HB 1055. It prohibits public school districts and charter schools from allowing a provider of abortion services to present materials or instruction in respect to sexuality. It establishes the alternatives to abortion program as a permanent program in state law. It mandates that any outpatient facility that performs second or third trimester abortions, or five or more first trimester abortions per year, must meet the health and safety standards of ambulatory surgical centers. While abortionists complained that this mandate could cause two abortion clinics in Missouri to shut down, the public must wonder how safe surgical abortions can actually be if abortion clinics cannot meet the standards that any other outpatient surgery center must meet.
At the end of the session, the pro-abortion side was handed a gift by a legislator who did not consider the pro-abortion ramifications of his words. There is a right way and a wrong way to do almost everything, and this legislator in haste did it the wrong way. He intended to amend HB 818 to allow nurse-midwives to practice their profession, a goal Missouri Right to Life does not oppose. The legislator provided that anyone with “tocological” certification could perform services related to pregnancy. Tocological is a 19th century word for midwifery, when midwives were the primary providers of illegal abortions. Unfortunately, the amendment also used the phrase, “notwithstanding any other law to the contrary.” This superseded an existing law that forbids anyone but doctors from performing abortions. The legal effect of these lapses in language is to allow certified nurse-midwives to perform abortions, a result that all pro-lifers oppose.
In the area of cloning and unethical experiments on human embryos, the efforts to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2008 to correct the obvious loopholes of Amendment 2 were stifled, snubbing the hundreds of pro-life citizens who visited the Capitol on Lobby Day. Moreover, the proponents of anti-life projects won state resources for their work. Funding was proposed from the sale of approximately half of MOHELA’s loan portfolio for the Lewis & Clark Discovery Initiative (SB 389), from the Life Science Trust Fund (HB 7), and from direct appropriations to the Missouri Technology Corporation, a private non-profit company, whose board includes many of the individuals who led the campaign in favor of Amendment 2.
The opposition of Missouri Right to Life and other prolife groups to all these resource requests could not overcome the pressure that the Governor and legislative leadership brought to bear in their favor. While the descriptions of the projects were narrowed considerably in an attempt to respond to pro-life concerns, there still remained monies that appeared open for use by the cloners. Even if none remained, however, Amendment 2 provides, “No state or local governmental body or official shall eliminate, reduce, deny, or withhold any public funds provided or eligible to be provided to a person that (i) lawfully conducts stem cell research or provides stem cell therapies and cures, . . .” The reduction or elimination of the funds to meet pro-life concerns was precisely what Amendment 2 prohibits. On the legislative floor, some otherwise pro-life legislators claimed that Amendment 2 really doesn’t mean what it says, including some who gave speeches against Amendment 2 last fall highlighting precisely this problem. How Amendment 2 means something different now than it did during last year’s campaign was never described.