Faith and Service: A Moral Reckoning on Missouri’s Abortion Policies

“Love the Lord your God... This is the first and greatest commandment. …Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law… hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:37-40

As a rural Black woman, my faith is my core and wholly centered around these Red Letter commandments- I take them seriously. I am currently serving my second term as the Vice Chair of the Missouri Democratic Party, and this service is how I put my faith into action. Like many in my community, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of elective abortion. Faith demands that I take a different path—one that centers my discomfort around truly loving my neighbor. That is why I have also served on the board of my local pregnancy resource center and have donated to them for over a decade. My faith calls me to focus on meeting the needs of Missouri’s pregnant women, to protect life.

Love God. Love your neighbor. It’s the beginning and end of my faith.

Let’s be clear: no one ever desires an abortion. The issue is complex. There are medical complications that necessitate abortion. There are failures of violence—rape, incest, and abuse, and there are systemic economic hardships that lead to abortion. Like faith itself, every abortion decision is deeply personal. Missouri Republicans have decided otherwise.

For Missouri Republicans, abortion is a government decision, their choice. For decades, they have entertained new, cruel abortion restrictions every legislative session, culminating in Missouri becoming the first state to implement a complete abortion ban after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Like many Red States, Missouri has spent decades passing one abortion restriction after another. But these bans didn’t pull anyone out of the water. Missouri’s laws made elective abortion more inconvenient; they never actually stopped it. The ban was a legal sleight of hand that forced women to drive to Kansas City, Kansas, instead of Kansas City, Missouri, or to East St. Louis instead of St. Louis. Two years after Dobbs, the number of abortions nationwide surpassed one million for the first time in history.

Abortion bans don’t stop abortions.

It’s time to go upstream and do the real work. Why are women falling in the river? Thanks to the actions of these ‘pro-life’ legislators, Missouri is one of the most dangerous places on earth to be pregnant:

• Half of Missouri’s rural hospitals have closed, leaving many rural pregnant women hours away from obstetric care.

• Missouri’s maternal death rates rival those of developing nations like Sudan and Somalia.

• Women face a 1.5-hour average wait time to access Missouri’s expanded maternal benefits, which often prevents them from getting the services they need.

• Missouri’s Republican-led Legislature made it nearly impossible for pregnant women to sue employers for wrongful termination.

• Missouri workers have no paid maternity leave.

If Missouri Republicans truly valued life, they would support pro-pregnancy laws that address how hard life is for Missouri families. These are the policies they would champion if ‘saving babies’ were the real goal. Instead, they have used the abortion issue to fill campaign coffers, stage political theater, and rally their base. They’ve proposed databases to track pregnant women, sought to criminalize crossing state borders for abortion care, and pushed for even harsher bans.

It’s almost like they’re not serious about abortion at all. But, they sure do seem to like the politics of abortion.

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Yvonne Reeves-Chong is currently serving her second term as the Vice Chairwoman of the Missouri Democratic Party.