Show-Me State Times

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - In an effort to protect the unborn, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey joined a coalition of 18 states in filing an amicus brief urging the Ohio Supreme Court to reject the legal challenge to Ohio’s Heartbeat Act, which prevents performing or inducing an abortion after a heartbeat is detected.

“As Attorney General, I will always defend the rights of states to protect the unborn,” said Attorney General Bailey. “The people’s elected representatives in Ohio have spoken on the issue of abortion, and that decision by the state legislature needs to be protected.”

In the brief, the attorneys general assert that the United States Supreme Court recognized in Dobbs “that Roe did not just get the U.S. Constitution wrong but also ‘distort[ed]’ ‘important’ legal rules” and  “counted this decades-long distortion of basic legal rules as a strong reason to overrule Roe and set the law right.”

The states continue, “But as abortion disputes have, after Dobbs, returned to the States, state courts have been urged to continue distorting the law to protect abortion.”

In the brief, the attorneys general explain that when other courts have granted abortion providers standing, they “departed from sound principles of standing, damaged the law, and hurt the Court. There is no good reason for this Court to engraft those problems onto Ohio law and to bring that harm to this State’s courts.” 

The attorneys general warn, “Nothing could be more damaging to a court than a jurisprudence that is at war with the demand to act based on neutral principles.”

The brief concludes that the Court should “hold that abortion providers lack third-party standing to challenge laws regulating or restricting abortions, like the Heartbeat Act challenged here.”

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia joined Attorney General Bailey in filing the brief.

Read the full amicus brief here: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/preterm-cleveland-v-yost---states_-amicus-brief-_as-filed_.pdf?sfvrsn=ce7ecc88_2

Original source can be found here.