Dr. Jennifer Smith's Fight for Missouri's Abortion Rights
Dr. Jennifer Smith remembers canvassing to overturn Missouri’s abortion ban back in 2024. Now she’s spending her weekends knocking doors in her white coat to make sure her home state doesn’t ban abortion again. Smith, an OB-GYN, had seen what happened to her patients after Roe v. Wade was overturned and a “trigger” law immediately went into effect banning virtually all abortions in the state.
You could see how scared people were to just consider being pregnant in the state of Missouri, Smith said. “I had husbands feel the need to tell me that I should save their wives if something should happen in the pregnancy. And that’s a pretty terrifying place to be.” Even before the fall of Roe, abortion access in Missouri was extremely limited. The state is home to some of the most vociferous abortion opponents in the country. Among them are Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, his wife Erin, a top attorney at the Alliance Defending Freedom, and Ed Martin, a stop-the-stealer who helped craft the GOP’s fetal personhood platform in 2024.
Missouri is also one of the most dangerous states for pregnant women, with maternal mortality rates much higher than most of the country. Once the trigger ban was enacted, the medical-legal landscape became even darker for both patients and doctors: OB-GYN residency applications in the state declined by 25 percent.
People who needed abortions were forced to spend time and money on travel, and made to experience some of the worst moments of their lives isolated in an unfamiliar place. Some drove for hours on end while in danger of sepsis or hemorrhage just to reach a hospital that would treat them.
Dr. Smith remembered her patient, who was pregnant twice in one year, and both times her baby had a chromosomal abnormality. Twice, she and her husband had to make the difficult decision a parent can make: to end the pregnancy. And twice they had to leave the state to get the care they needed, away from their home, their doctor, everything familiar.
In 2024, Missouri voters passed a referendum to repeal the state’s near-total ban, with 51.6 percent of the vote—their first state to enact a “trigger ban” and reject it at the ballot box. But that wasn’t the end of the story: even after the ban was overturned, Missouri implemented dozens of restrictions on how abortion clinics could operate—ensuring that in much of the state, abortion was legal in theory but not in practice.
Now, Dr. Smith is back to knocking doors in her white coat. This time, she’s asking people to vote no on 2026’s Amendment 3—which, despite sharing a number with the 2024 amendment, does the opposite. A significant difference between the two measures is the initiation method – previous had been started by the citizens, whereas Amendment 3 was initiated by the legislature.
The Stop The Ban campaign manager, Alessia Modjarrad, said stop Amendment 3, pointing out that Amendment 3 contains the language that will prohibit gender affirmation care. In 2023, this procedure was illegal in Missouri, but with Amendment 3, it will be made illegal at the state’s constitutional level, and doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors would be prohibited.
Some of the same people who pushed to ban gender-affirming care for Missouri kids in 2023 are now fighting to enshrine that ban in the state’s constitution. Prominent among them is Jamie Reed, a former Washington University Transgender Center clinic employee turned prolific speaker on the anti-trans circuit.
Reed claimed she worked in a gender transition clinic, where she saw how children are manipulated into undergoing irreversible surgeries. However, her past claims were disputed by patients and parents when court.
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