Missouri is scrambling to keep its abortion restrictions on the books—after voters already passed a constitutional amendment in November 2024 protecting the right to abortion in the state. And it’s using an unexpected legal maneuver to defend those laws in court: resuscitating Roe v. Wade.

This is a bitter legal irony.

Missouri Republicans spent decades passing cruel, medically unnecessary abortion restrictions. They imposed a mandatory 72-hour pre-abortion waiting period—one of the nation’s longest—paired with state-scripted propaganda disguised as “informed consent.” They legislated a near-total abortion ban that would restrict care before most people even know they’re pregnant. They’ve stood by as their regulations threatened abortion clinics. They celebrated when Roe fell, forcing pregnant Missourians to flee the state for care.

What Republicans didn’t expect when their trigger abortion ban finally took effect on June 24, 2022 is that it would awaken a sleeping giant of pro-choice Missourians. Now that Missouri voters have chosen to protect the right to abortion—51.6 percent to 48.4 percent, thank you very much—Missouri conservatives are in court arguing that the state’s anti-abortion laws remain perfectly constitutional, actually.

And they’re invoking Roe—the now-defunct 1973 case that made abortion legal nationwide—to do it. Not because the government has changed its mind and decided to just let the people have their abortions. And not because Missouri Republicans respect Roe, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in 2022 following a decades-long push by right-wing anti-abortion forces.

No. Missouri’s government is arguing that Roe still stands because the state’s new constitutional protections for abortion go further than Roe ever did. Suddenly, it seems, Roe doesn’t look so bad to the GOP.

Amendment 3 ‘ain’t your mama’s Roe-style right to abortion’

The procedural mess in this case is almost as infuriating as the underlying politics.

For years, Missouri has had a laundry list of abortion restrictions. Its Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws are designed to make it damn near impossible to give or get abortion care. They require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital—a requirement that has no medical benefit—and mandate that medication abortion providers create “complication plans” for mifepristone, even though this abortion medication is safer than Tylenol. Missouri also has “ambulatory surgical center requirements” that force abortion clinics to meet the same standards as outpatient surgical facilities—even if they don’t perform abortion procedures, or any surgeries at all.

Then in 2024, after the fall of Roe allowed the state’s trigger ban to take effect, Missouri voters passed Amendment 3, which codified their right to abortion. The state’s constitution now allows abortion up to fetal viability (generally around 24 to 26 weeks of gestation), or beyond that if the pregnant person’s life or health is at risk. Additionally, under Amendment 3, any government attempt to “deny, interfere with, delay, or otherwise restrict” a person’s reproductive freedom is presumed invalid.

After the amendment passed, Planned Parenthood sued to challenge the state’s draconian abortion restrictions, arguing that they were now unconstitutional. State Judge Jerri Zhang agreed.

In December 2024 and February 2025, Zhang blocked most of Missouri’s abortion regulations, allowing several Planned Parenthood clinics to reopen. Attorney General Andrew Bailey then ran crying to the Missouri Supreme Court, which responded on May 27 by shutting down abortion access in Missouri. The decision was based on a technicality: Bailey said Judge Zhang used the wrong standard in her rulings. Starting May 28, Missouri’s few remaining abortion clinics started cancelling appointments and sending their patients to Kansas.

The Missouri Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the regulations themselves.

But I can tell you one thing about Amendment 3’s protections for abortion: This ain’t your mama’s Roe-style right to abortion. Amendment 3 is Roe dancing down the street Beyoncé-style, wearing a yellow dress and smashing car windows.

Unnecessary regulations are out, so Missouri turns to shoddy logic

Missouri’s abortion restrictions patently deny, interfere with, delay, or restrict a person’s reproductive freedom. And the only way to save them, under Amendment 3, is for Missouri to meet a very high bar: The government must demonstrate “that such action is justified by a compelling governmental interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”

And here’s where it gets really good: The only compelling interest acceptable under Amendment 3 is one designed to improve the health of the person seeking care, based on widely accepted standards and evidence-based medicine. Plus, the restriction can’t infringe on that person’s autonomous decision making.

Unlike federal abortion law under Roe, it leaves no window open for lawmakers to sneak in medically-unnecessary regulations. That’s why Missouri is ignoring the plain language of Amendment 3 and is instead claiming in court that Roe still stands. Here’s their argument: In campaigning to pass Amendment 3, its backers promised voters that “this will restore Roe.”

So, Missouri is basically saying, because that’s what the campaign was, that’s what the law is.

“Because Amendment 3 restores the Roe v. Wade standard to Missouri,” reads the state’s November 24, 2024 court brief, “anything that was upheld under that standard is still good law.”

But Missourians didn’t just restore Roe—they made it clear they wanted more.

“The Amendment was written with such a high standard of scrutiny, with such intentional level of protection, that these laws are blatantly unconstitutional,” Mallory Schwarz, executive director of the abortion rights advocacy group Abortion Action Missouri, who was at the table when Amendment 3 was being drafted, told me in a telephone interview.

Rather than repealing their unconstitutional abortion restrictions, however, Missouri is arguing that any of its abortion-related laws and regulations that survived under Roe remain valid. Missouri’s lawyers are trying to shoe-horn their pre-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, anti-abortion laws back under Roe’s more lenient standards. They want Roe in place as a ceiling on abortion rights–instead of a floor.

“Anti-abortion lawmakers are trying to bypass the will of the people by moving the goalposts,” Margot Riphagen, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said in a statement to Rewire News Group. “We have seen this over and over again in Missouri—when state officials don’t like how their constituents vote, they change the rules.”

You can only reach the GOP’s conclusion by ignoring that the plain language of the amendment goes a lot further than Roe did.

If this legal argument sounds specious, that’s because it is.

“When this should eventually make it to the Missouri Supreme Court, I’m confident they will see that,” Schwarz said.

If the Missouri Supreme Court ultimately follows the text of Amendment 3, abortion rights in Missouri could be treated with the same level of constitutional protection as the right to own a firearm.

You heard me right.

This isn’t a metaphor. A similar argument was made last year in another Midwestern courtroom. As part of an October 2024 ruling in Preterm-Cleveland v. Yost, Ohio state court judge Christian Jenkins said, “interestingly, the structure of the Amendment places the right to abortion in Ohio on par with the right to possess a firearm,” citing the 2022 Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Imagine that. An Ohio court said the state’s new reproductive-freedom amendment was equivalent to the Second Amendment in terms of what the government must prove to pass any law limiting constitutional rights.

This amuses me. Because what’s the thing that conservatives love as much as they hate abortion? Guns. Republicans spent decades trying to ban abortion, and now, thanks to a legal self-own, it may theoretically become as easy to get an abortion in Missouri as it is to buy a Glock. Missouri Republicans might end up hoisted with their own petard.

Ultimately, the Missouri Supreme Court will have the last word on the constitutionality of the state’s regulations. The court may interpret Amendment 3 in a way that permits Missouri to continue passing laws that punish and control pregnant patients under the guise of health and safety. But in my lawyerly opinion, any fair reading of Amendment 3 would require the Missouri Supreme Court to side with Planned Parenthood and, by extension, pro-choice Missourians.

For now, Missouri is trapped in a legal hall of mirrors, clinging to Roe v. Wade, a precedent they tried to destroy for decades. This is the fallout of an anti-abortion movement that will never survive when people—especially women and people who can get pregnant—take the power back.