When Mark Ludwig lost shared custody of his son more than a decade ago, his life fell apart.

“The devastation of losing my son who was my sole purpose in life, I couldn’t function,” Ludwig, who lives in the St. Louis area, told the Missouri House Children and Families Committee in late January. “I lost everything from the point where I went from being a pretty decent middle class dad to where I was eating food out of dumpsters at the Aldi… I didn’t know where to turn.”

Now Ludwig advocates for fathers to be treated equally in the court system. He also drives for Uber in St. Louis where he chats up other dads, many of whom he said share stories of being raised without a present. ...

Wes Groggins didn’t mince words when he testified to a Missouri Senate committee Monday in support of legislation expanding legal protections for embryos.

The executive director of Abolish Abortion Missouri invoked the Bible’s Old Testament in his justification that anyone who has an abortion or assists someone in accessing an abortion should be charged with murder.

“God demands equal justice,” he said, “equal protection for all persons.”...

Missouri’s trigger law banning nearly all abortions remains in place. But at 12:01 a.m. Friday, Amendment 3 will go into effect.

The constitutional amendment, which received 51.6% of the nearly 3 million votes cast, prohibits the legislature from regulating abortion prior to the point of fetal viability — generally seen as the point at which a fetus can likely survive outside the womb without extraordinary measures.

Planned Parenthood officials said they have providers and staff prepared to start seeing patients for walk-in medication abortion appointments at three clinics — in Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia — beginning Friday, followed later by scheduled surgical abortions. ...

Missouri’s attorney general has renewed a push to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone, arguing in a lawsuit filed this month that its availability hurt the state by decreasing teenage pregnancy.

The revised lawsuit was filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, alongside GOP attorneys general in Kansas and Idaho. It asks a judge in Texas to order the Federal Drug Administration to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone, one of two medications prescribed to induce chemical abortions.

The trio of attorneys general were forced to refile the litigation after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the original lawsuit after concluding the original plaintiffs — a group of anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations — did not have standing to sue because they couldn’t show they had been harmed. ...

The family business that owns the Kansas City Chiefs is one of the biggest funders of a political action committee opposing a proposed amendment to overturn Missouri’s abortion ban.

Unity Hunt, the business that controls the assets of the late Lamar Hunt, including the Chiefs, in late September donated $300,000 to the Leadership for America PAC. It is currently running ads on several conservative radio stations across the state opposing the abortion-rights amendment, which will appear on the November ballot as Amendment 3.

Leadership for America is an independent spending PAC created in January. Prior to receiving the donation from Unity Hunt, the PAC had $31,159 on hand. ...