"The reason for the challenge is that Amendment 3 has not followed the election laws sufficiently to be included on the ballot," says attorney Mary Catherine Martin of Thomas More Society, the law firm that filed the lawsuit on behalf of state lawmakers and concerned individuals.
- The lawsuit has three claims. One, the drafters of Amendment 3 did not adequately compose the initiative petition that they handed out to get signatures.
"Specifically, there are laws that require that petition sheet to include a list of all existing laws that will be repealed by the measure, and they listed none, despite the fact that the stated, intended, conceded, totally admitted to purpose of this includes
repealing all of Missouri's laws on abortion," explains Martin. "So, they just left out – when asking people for their support – the actual effect of their measure, and they're going to argue that that's fine because the law allows it. But we interpret the law differently."
The second claim states that it unconstitutionally includes more than one subject.
"In this case, they have attached a whole bunch of the entire gamut of reproductive care issues to abortion," says Martin. "We've got most of the state thinking this isn't an amendment about abortion when it in fact treats abortion a little bit more lightly than it does everything else related to reproductive care."
Third is a constitutional claim challenging Thomas More Society's "inability" to challenge this adequately in the amount of time the statutes allow.
"We're left this year with 28 days total to get our legal challenge all the way through the Missouri Supreme Court if necessary, and that's just an unconstitutional burden," says Martin.
Meanwhile, Thomas More Society dismisses claims that this is a last-second attack to try to keep the issue off the ballot.
More than abortion
"People on both sides continuously mistakenly refer to this as an abortion amendment and in fact we've people going to media outlets and saying we're ‘just making us go back to Roe versus Wade,’ when in fact this amendment is so far beyond Roe versus Wade in breadth of issues," says Martin.
"It's any matter related to a list of reproductive care issues that is including but not limited to the issues that you would rattle off -- abortion, contraception -- but because it's all matters related to reproductive care it’s just anything that anyone in the future can claim is related to reproductive care.”
This would actually make abortion more protected than it was under Roe v. Wade, Martin said.
