GOP with 'nothing to lose' resorts to 'absurd ploy' after losing major votes

Republicans in Missouri saw their state's abortion ban overturned by a popular referendum last year, the latest in a long line of red states where voters rejected extreme prohibitions on the procedure. But Republicans are now resorting to an "absurd" ploy to pressure voters into voting on an amendment that would effectively reverse their previous decision — and it has insulting echoes of decades of extreme anti-women tactics by abortion restrictionists, wrote Mary Ziegler for Slate.

The new amendment the GOP is pushing, wrote Ziegler, "would allow for exceptions slightly broader than the ones in the ban that Amendment 3 repealed, including certain severe medical emergencies, fetal abnormalities, and rape and incest (for the latter, survivors would have access only for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy). The amendment would also ban gender-affirming care for minors, which Missouri law already prohibits."

The GOP, however, argues it's not really trying to force voters to undo their own democratic will: "Instead, they reason that voters didn’t understand how extreme Amendment 3 was—and didn’t have a real choice because they weren’t offered a middle ground between Amendment 3 and the old ban, which contained only a life exception."

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This kind of argument — that abortion rights supporters are too ignorant or uninformed to know what they're doing — has a long and storied use in the anti-abortion movement, Ziegler wrote.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, a thriving clinic-blockade movement was damaging the reputation of the anti-abortion movement, especially following an escalation in violence against clinics and providers," she wrote. "The leaders of prominent anti-abortion groups wanted to establish that they weren’t anti-woman, even as they recognized a tension in framing abortion as murder without condemning women for choosing it. To reconcile these tensions, anti-abortion leaders stressed that women didn’t understand what they were choosing. The movement championed 'right to know' laws that claimed to inform women of the nature of life in the womb and the medical risks of abortion. Other abortion opponents claimed that most abortions were coerced."

But it's the GOP trying to mislead voters through the ballot language of their own amendment, she said.

"The proposal moving through the state Legislature asks voters whether they want to 'guarantee access to care for medical emergencies, ectopic pregnancies, and miscarriages,' ensure women’s safety, permit parental consent for minors, 'allow abortions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, rape, and incest,' 'require physicians to provide medically accurate information,' and 'protect children from gender transition'" — all evidently hoping voters not following the news will think this sounds reasonable.

But at the end of the day, she wrote, "The new proposal in Missouri isn’t about giving voters a more nuanced choice. It’s a show of force from a party in a state that thinks it has nothing to lose."