State legislation enacting severe regulations on medical clinics and independent abortion providers as well as facilitating ineffective abstinence-only programs in public schools is set to arrive on the desk of Missouri Governor Matt Blunt any day. Governor Blunt said that he would sign a bill quietly passed in his state's Senate and House last week essentially shutting down two out of the three abortion clinics in his state; allowing schools in his state to teach abstinence-only education to the exclusion of fact-based, medically accurate sex education; and funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars of state and federal funds to anti-choice programs that push alternatives to abortion and provide no access to family planning.

HB 1055 was passed with little attention last Friday. But the consequences could mean one more barrier to safe, abortion care for women in this country and the endangerment of young people's health with its focus on failed STI and pregnancy prevention strategies.

Who knew?

Few of us — very few. Despite a handful of local stories in the mainstream Missouri media, this measure passed to crickets chirping on the national media front. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri challenged the measure every step of the way knowing full well what the bill was intended to do:

"This has absolutely nothing to do with women's safety," says Planned Parenthood lobbyist Michelle Trupiano. "The regulations would regulate door sizes, closet doors, carpet depth and nothing that has to do with women's safety. This is the legislature's attempt to close two of three clinics in Missouri."

The bill states that all facilities that perform second or third trimester abortions as well as more than five first trimester abortions a month need to be regulated by the Department of Health as ambulatory surgical centers. These regulations will make it overwhelmingly difficult, if not impossible, for two out of the three remaining Planned Parenthood medical centers that provide abortions in Missouri to survive by forcing them to invest upwards of $500,000 towards meaningless "upgrades."

When the law goes into effect (scheduled for August 2007), St. Louis will be the only city in Missouri where women can access abortion services.

These "upgrades" are not meant to ensure women's health or safety. In fact, the Planned Parenthood centers at risk provide a full range of much needed health care services to the women and men of all income levels throughout Missouri including pap tests, breast and testicular cancer screening, gynecological exams, HIV/STI testing and treatment, infertility treatment and more. Meanwhile, 570,210 adults between the ages of 19 and 64 are uninsured in Missouri while Medicaid subsidizes a great percentage of these adults. Far from ensuring health care access for residents of his state, Governor Blunt will be effectively reducing their options dramatically by regulating these Planned Parenthood facilities out of business.

In addition, these centers have a perfect bill of health themselves. I could find no complaints filed against them, no health violations lodged, and not one consumer warning via the state's Attorney General's office.

Still, representatives like Sen. Delbert Scott who pushed the bill hide behind deceitful language and false claims to support their stance:

"There's nothing hidden here that we are against abortion," says Scott. "There's nothing in the bill that would close them down. They need to be clean. They need to be inspected. They need to have records just like another [sic] other operation center. That's the purpose, to bring them into that compliance."

Even some anti-choice senators concede that this will do nothing to decrease the number of abortions in their state but may, in fact, with its emphasis on abstinence-only education for young people contribute to an increase:

"This bill will lead to more abortions in Missouri," said Sen. Wes Shoemyer, D-Clarence, who is generally anti-abortion but voted against the bill Friday.

And while the bill talks of sexuality education that is "medically and factually accurate" it goes on to point out that the curriculum must present the "emotional trauma" which results from teenage sexual activity. My favorite section includes an option to teach either the "medically factual information" or the "information on contraceptives and pregnancy in a manner consistent with the provisions of the federal abstinence education law." You get to choose: fact or fiction? And yet the irony of Missouri passing this law only weeks after the president's federal abstinence-only program has been proven a colossal failure cannot be overlooked.

In a nod to those students unlucky enough to have gone through the medically un-factual curriculum, the bill also states that any education should include a discussion of the "advantages of adoption, including the adoption of special needs children, and the processes involved in making an adoption plan…"

The bill also disallows any information, brochures, presentations, or speakers from centers that provide abortions. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and mid-Missouri has a trained and experienced education department that provide presentations on everything from building self-esteem to (what?!) choosing abstinence. However there is nothing explicitly barring presentations, or printed materials from religious groups or centers with a clear abstinence-only-until-marriage agenda.

The legislation also centers on the "Missouri Alternatives to Abortion Program" which codifies state-sponsored forced birth by offering money to programs that provide assistance to women who agree to carry their pregnancy to term instead of having abortions (how do the women prove they were planning on having an abortion but changed their mind?) and then "helping them to place their children up for adoption." To its credit, the program would fund a range of services from prenatal care to food and clothing through the baby's first year to job training and placement for the mother. What it won't fund? Family planning services.

To re-cap Missouri's legislative lesson — we won't teach you how to prevent pregnancy if you have sex; we won't enable you to access a full range of options if you do become pregnant; and if you have the child? Well we certainly won't provide you with services so that you do not become pregnant again if you don't want to be.

The sexual and reproductive health advocacy community in this country must pay close attention to what it is occurring on the state level. It's not only the federal laws that should engender outrage and scrutiny. Just look at Missouri or Kansas or Utah to see what is behind us – and what just might be a sign of things to come.