Planned Parenthood halted abortions in Missouri on Tuesday after the state's top court ordered new rulings in the tumultuous legal saga over a ban that voters struck down last November, the AP reports. The state's top court ruled that a district judge applied the wrong standard in rulings in December and February that allowed abortions to resume in the state. Nearly all abortions were halted under a ban that took effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, but citizens voted in November to overturn the ban.
In Tuesday's two-page ruling, the court ordered Judge Jerri Zhang to vacate her earlier orders and reevaluate the case using the standards the court laid out. Zhang ruled that she was allowing abortions to resume largely because advocates were likely to prevail in the case eventually. The Supreme Court said it should first consider whether there would be harms from allowing abortions to resume.
The state emphasized in their petition filed to the state Supreme Court in March that Planned Parenthood didn't sufficiently prove women were harmed without the temporary blocks on the broad swath of laws and regulations on abortion services and providers. On the contrary, the state said Zhang's decisions left abortion facilities "functionally unregulated" and women with "no guarantee of health and safety." Among the regulations that had been placed on hold were ones setting cleanliness standards for abortion facilities and requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at certain types of hospitals located within 30 miles or 15 minutes of where an abortion is provided.
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Planned Parenthood maintains that those restrictions were specifically targeted to make it harder to access abortion. Still, the organization—which has the state's only abortion clinics—immediately started calling patients to cancel abortion appointments at Missouri clinics in Columbia and Kansas City, according to Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains. Wales said Planned Parenthood hopes to be back in court soon. Missouri is the only state where voters have used a ballot measure to overturn a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy. The Republican-controlled state government pushed back in court against allowing abortions to resume—something that didn't happen until more than three months after the amendment was adopted.
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