This is wild: the Missouri Attorney General’s office not only used taxpayer dollars for an anti-abortion ad—they also wrote said advertisement with an extremist organization that doesn’t believe in life-saving abortions. Buckle up.
KSDK News reports that an ad released by AG Catherine Hanaway’s office tells viewers that “abortion clinics in Missouri are not required to meet the same basic medical standards as other healthcare facilities.”
It’s not a coincidence that Hanaway released the ad now: in November, voters will decide on a ballot measure that would codify an abortion ban into the state constitution. As you probably remember, Missouri voters already passed a pro-choice ballot measure in 2024, but Republicans have been trying to repeal it ever since. This new ballot measure is their latest attempt. They even named the proposed ban Amendment 3, because that’s what the pro-choice measure was called. (They’re hoping to trick voters into supporting an abortion ban.)
Here’s the thing: Missouri law prevents state officials from using public funds to support or oppose a ballot measure. In other words, the ad is illegal. But Hanaway claims the ad doesn’t run afoul of Missouri law because it doesn’t mention the ballot measure by name.
“It says absolutely nothing about a ballot measure,” she told KSDK. This is exactly what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in 2024, when he illegally used state funds to launch a disinformation website against the pro-choice ballot measure Amendment 4. He insisted that everything on the site was “factual” and that it wasn’t “weighing in on any particular measure, whether you should vote for or against something.” (As you’ll see later in the newsletter, a grand jury just found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated funds for this campaign.)
If the Missouri GOP doesn’t care about the law, maybe they’ll care about bad PR: to write the ad, Hanaway’s office enlisted the help of the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs (AAPLOG). This is a group that believes that emergency contraception and IUDs are really abortions, that raped children should be forced to give birth, and that women with life-threatening pregnancies should be given c-sections instead of standard abortions—even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive.
Why? Because they don’t believe in life-saving abortions. In fact, they claim abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life.
Hellbound and Down 