In November, Missouri voters approved a ballot measure meant to end the state’s total abortion ban (which made only very narrow exceptions for life-threatening emergencies), adding an amendment to the state’s constitution that protected reproductive freedom, including the right to an abortion. The measure did not, however, automatically repeal the state’s dozens of anti-abortion laws—including those that have long made it impossible for young people in Missouri to obtain an abortion in the state. The new reproductive freedom amendment places no age limit on whose abortion rights it is meant to protect. But even as the measure’s backers brought challenges to numerous other abortion restrictions soon after Election Day, they did not challenge the two restrictions that effectively punish young people for seeking an abortion.
A lawsuit filed today seeks to overturn two state anti-abortion restrictions for people under 18, based on the rights protected by the reproductive freedom amendment. Among states that have advanced abortion rights ballot measures, Missouri is not alone in leaving such laws unchallenged; in fact, it may be the first of those states where advocates have tried to overturn them. While many reproductive rights’ groups have been eager to put abortion on the ballot, it seems there are still some abortion rights they are slow to defend.
The group bringing the legal challenge, Right By You, is a free abortion-support text line that aims to be, for young people, “basically in their pocket as a resource,” executive director Stephanie Kraft Sheley told me by phone this week. “A young person is free to text us throughout their entire experience.” Sometimes, the text line might be that young person’s only support. But Right By You is barred from providing funding for abortion and related costs. The group is prohibited from paying for or coordinating the travel, lodging, or childcare that abortion seekers might need in order to access care.
Under Missouri’s ban on helping minors obtain an abortion, a group like Right By You risks onerous fines, or being legally compelled to shut down by the state attorney general. Under the state’s mandated parental involvement law, it could also be subject to criminal liability, according to the group’s lawsuit, if it helps a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent. That law requires young people seeking an abortion to obtain consent from one parent or legal guardian, as well as notification from another, requirements that in practice prevent “some young people from even seeking an abortion,” the legal challenge states.
As volunteers at the text line regularly confront when explaining the laws to young people, the parental involvement law might result in delaying an abortion, which would in turn, because of the state’s gestational ban, limit the abortion seeker’s options for where they can get care and add “medical risks, added expenses, and stress,” according to the complaint. And because the parental involvement law requires either parental consent or an exception granted by a judge, “it coerces some young people to divulge intimate information to strangers because they are seeking abortion.” Together, these laws can put young people in even more precarious situations. What if a young person doesn’t have a trusted parent or guardian and needs to go to a state with less restrictive laws for an abortion? Anyone who helps them do so could run afoul of the abortion support ban too.
All that could be changing, owing to the new amendment protecting reproductive freedom in Missouri’s state constitution. But making the promise of that amendment a reality also requires people to bring challenges such as this one. “It takes bravery to bring these sorts of challenges,” said Rupali Sharma, co-director of litigation at the Lawyering Project and one of the attorneys representing Right By You. Right By You is seeking emergency relief in this case—meaning that the state could be immediately barred from enforcing these restrictions while the challenge proceeds in court. Young people in Missouri are experiencing “irreparable harm,” Sharma said, and every day this law remains in effect, Right By You “can’t fulfill its mission, and its clients are suffering.”
For young people, Right By You’s legal challenge argues, the ban on abortion support and the parental involvement mandate “deny, interfere with, delay, or otherwise restrict” their right to abortion, which is a violation of Missouri’s new amendment. Though the ballot measure in Missouri bars the state from restricting abortion access up to the point of fetal viability—a legal limit drawn at the point a fetus is thought to be able to survive outside the womb, typically between 22 and 24 weeks—it has no age limit on those whose rights to abortion are protected. “The text of the amendment is clear,” Sharma said. “It doesn’t leave young people out.”
Critically, the amendment also protects people from being punished for obtaining an abortion and for helping someone obtain an abortion. That protection paves the way for these two challenges to abortion restrictions, the ban on abortion support and the parental involvement mandate, to proceed together. “They obviously work together to humiliate young people, to burden young people,” Sharma said. “They need to be understood together.”
Parental involvement mandates are still quite common; more than half of states have a law on the books mandating parental notification and/or consent in minors’ abortions. In recent years, some of these laws have been struck down, as Montana did in 2024, or repealed, as Illinois did in 2021, after a report by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU of Illinois found that the state’s Parental Notice of Abortion Act “undermines the safety, health, and dignity of young people.” Major medical organizations have also defended young patients’ rights to independently choose to have an abortion, despite these laws. The American Academy of Pediatrics has taken the position that “it is the adolescent’s right to decide the outcome of their pregnancy and the people who should be involved.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called for the repeal of mandatory parental involvement laws; the American Public Health Association has stated that minors should not be forced to involve their parents when deciding whether to have an abortion; and the American Medical Association has called on physicians to be mindful of legal obligations but also asserted that physicians should “not feel or be compelled to require” minors to obtain consent of their parents” for abortion care.
Even the laws’ attempts to safeguard young people can function as another kind of barrier, if not a punishment. For young people who can’t obtain consent from a parent or guardian, they can request a judicial bypass—to go before a judge and make the case for an exception. But to do so, a young person has to disclose information about their family, and about their pregnancy. It can be traumatizing, Sharma said. Young people are “just so worried that if they said the wrong thing or wore the wrong thing or misunderstood what the judge was asking, the penalty of that would be having to remain pregnant.”
Kraft Sheley likened what she has seen in judicial bypass hearings to a “humiliation ritual.” On the text line, when a Right By You volunteer explains the judicial bypass process to an abortion seeker, she said, “after hearing what it involves, going to court and explaining in a group full of adult strangers how they got pregnant, intimate details about their life, what their fears are based on their prior experiences of abuse, that’s enough alone for some young people to say, I’m not doing that. And I’d rather stay pregnant even though I don’t want to.”
Though their state constitution now protects Missourians from being punished and burdened in this way, young people will only be protected if these laws are challenged. “It’s up to advocates to now bring challenges, in order to take advantage of what is possible under the amendment,” Kraft Sheley explained.
So far, although Planned Parenthood and ACLU affiliates in Missouri swiftly challenged a number of anti-abortion laws since voters approved the reproductive freedom amendment, they have not challenged these two restrictions on young people’s right to abortion.
In other states where voters approved measures meant to protect abortion rights in state constitutions, as far as Kraft Sheley and Sharma know, there have not been subsequent challenges to parental involvement mandates or assistance bans. In Ohio, for example, where voters approved the Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative in 2023, no one has yet challenged the state’s restrictions for minors. “This is not something we can change without more community support,” said the executive director of one Ohio Planned Parenthood affiliate in 2024.
But in Missouri, Kraft Sheley is not willing to wait. Though she’s glad that Right By You can bring this challenge and “take that on,” she said, she is disappointed that more “well-resourced organizations” chose not to: “Young people were not prioritized. And it left us in the position of having to take it on ourselves.”
