Missouri lawmaker wants police officers to stop women from getting abortions

12 February 2020

Mike Moon, a Missouri state representative who once beheaded a chicken on Facebook to make a point about abortion, wants police officers to stop women from terminating pregnancies.

The Guardian reports:

Mike Moon, a Republican Missouri state representative, introduced a bill he calls the Right to Due Process Act, which redefines a fertilized egg as a person with all the constitutional rights of any other citizen. The suggested law then requires police and the courts to “affirmatively enforce” the Missouri constitution’s due process clause which guarantees legal rights to people, effectively turning any attempt to terminate a pregnancy into murder.

Moon also filed a bill to “abolish” abortion in Missouri, and specifically cites “murder by abortion”. The law makes no exemptions for rape, incest or apparently for women who have pregnancies which are not viable and potentially fatal, since the proposals strike references to abortion exemptions for maternal health.

…

“These abortion bills are a key part of a larger agenda to codify a far-right evangelical Christian America,” said Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

In 2019, Missouri was one of a handful of states which passed a ferociously anti-abortion law called “heartbeat bills”, which bans abortion at six weeks (in Missouri’s case, abortion is banned at eight weeks). But Missouri’s law was not just a six-week abortion ban.

Unbelievable! This is over-the-top and must end. Once again, forced-birthers are looking to get a case before the courts. #StopTheBans https://t.co/LZqX1tYSdl

— Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights (@GRRNow) February 10, 2020

Vice News reports:

In a pair of bills introduced recently, Rep. Mike Moon proposed that Missouri treat fertilized eggs as human beings from the moment of conception, with all the rights that go with that designation. One of the bills, dubbed “The Right to Due Process Act,” establishes that fetuses are protected by the due process clause of Missouri’s constitution, which rules that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” And cops and the courts, the bill makes clear, must enforce that provision.

That would effectively make ending a pregnancy legally equivalent to murder; indeed, in the other bill, Moon cites “abortion as murder.”

In that bill, which would outlaw abortion in Missouri, there are no exceptions for rape or incest survivors. A similar ban passed in Alabama last year, sparking a nationwide outcry; it has since been blocked from taking effect.

A Missouri Republican wants to totally abolish abortion in the state, legally redefine fetuses as people, and likely even have police go after women to “affirmatively enforce” the law. https://t.co/FBKcUL9nSo

— VICE News (@vicenews) February 6, 2020

Rep Moon has drawn comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust in the past. “The number of lives lost by abortion is more than we lost during slavery and during the Holocaust,” he said in February 2017. “We need to start looking at abortion in the same light as we do both of those tragic events.”

Next on @realDonaldTrump and @GOP agenda must be to fully defund Planned Parenthood. https://t.co/jlhFAelAYp

— Mike Moon (@realmikemoon) January 25, 2020

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