Reuben Hemmer
Scenes from a pro-abortion rally not long after the Supreme Court made the Dobbs decision.
Molly Housh Gordon is a Unitarian-Universalist minister from Columbia, Missouri. Gordon also has an autoimmune disease that can make pregnancy a life-threatening condition.
That’s one reason Gordon joined other religious leaders in a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s near-total abortion ban, arguing the lawmakers behind it are openly using the law to impose their religious views on others who don't share them — in violation of the Missouri Constitution.
“The truth is, I deserve to have autonomy over my body and my health,” Gordon said late Tuesday afternoon. “And the constitution of this state guarantees that.”
Gordon spoke at the end of a two-hour hearing in a St. Louis courtroom before state court Judge Jason Sengheiser, who heard arguments on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The motion was filed by the Missouri attorney general’s office.
Maria Lanahan, the state deputy solicitor general, argued that Gordon does not have standing to bring the lawsuit because Gordon isn’t pregnant, and therefore “is not ready and able to have an abortion right now.”
Lanahan also denied that the abortion ban was being used by one group to impose its religious views over those who disagree with it.
“I don’t really see an official religion here,” she said.
And even if the preamble to the law banning abortion contains religious language, “It has no practical effect on anything,” Lanahan said. The law begins with the words, “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.”
Missouri’s abortion ban went into effect a year ago, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Dobbs decision, overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving it up to individual states to decide on access to abortion services.
The law behind the abortion ban stipulates women who receive abortions cannot be prosecuted. But it makes it a felony punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison to perform or induce abortions, while medical professionals who do so also could lose their licenses. The Missouri lawsuit was filed in St. Louis in late January on behalf of 13 Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist leaders. It seeks a permanent injunction to bar the state from enforcing the ban, plus a declaration that the law violates the state constitution.
The lawsuit claims the lawmakers behind the abortion ban openly “invoked their personal religious beliefs as the reason for the law, enacting in the statute the religious views that ‘Almighty God is the author of life’ and that ‘the life of an individual human being begins at conception.’”
Two national non-profit groups are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit: Americans United, a D.C.-based group that advocates for religious freedom, and the National Women’s Law Center.
Christen Hammock Jones, a law center attorney, argued Missouri’s abortion ban requires the expenditure of taxpayer dollars to print up educational literature and to hire new employees.
This amounts to the establishment of religion that violates the state constitution and “requires taxpayer dollars be spent in service of that violation,” Jones said.
The abortion ban also favors one group’s religious views over everyone else’s, Jones said, thereby “forcing all Missouri citizens to act accordingly.”
Both parties are waiting on a ruling from the judge whether the case can continue.
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