missouri's anti-abortion campaign has posted 20 times since august. it said the word "abortion" once. we see you, babe.

via the Missouri Independent, The 19th and the campaign's own news feed

We read the campaign's blog so you don't have to. Here is what Missouri's anti-abortion campaign has been talking about since late August: girls' sports in California, a school board in Michigan, schools in England, Sophie Cunningham, Mount Sinai, North Dakota's supreme court and, twice, Kansas.

Amendment 3, on Missouri's November ballot, would repeal the abortion-rights amendment voters passed in 2024 and ban nearly all abortions, the Missouri Independent and The 19th report. It would also write a ban on gender-transition care for minors into the state constitution. One of those is the point of the amendment. Guess which one the campaign is selling.

what the yes campaign is running on

The first TV ad from Her Health, Her Future, the committee behind the measure, "did not mention abortion at all, but rather focused on 'trans extremists,'" the Missouri Independent reports, and its main signage reads "Yes on 3: Ban Transgender Surgeries for Minors." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board headlined its response "shameless trans ad".

The campaign is not shy about why. "There are several pieces of this that resonate really well, that we may not have gotten last time. The number one piece of that is the trans issue," Tom Estes, a Republican state Senate staffer working on the campaign, told The 19th. August polling suggests the care ban is far more popular than an abortion ban, The 19th reports, and the same SLU/YouGov survey had the amendment at 43% for, 44% against and 13% unsure.

So we counted. The campaign's news feed has 20 posts dated Aug. 25 through Oct. 2. One contains the word "abortion": a staffing announcement in which new campaign manager James Lawson says "late-term abortions and gender experiments on children are not Missouri values." The other 19 are about trans people. Two are victory laps on hospitals we covered when they happened, Mount Sinai and NYU Langone and UPMC. The homepage lists "Bans Transgender Procedures for Minors" first; abortion appears as "Requires Parental Consent Before Minors Have an Abortion," and in a quote from First Lady Claudia Kehoe, the committee's treasurer, about standing "boldly for the unborn."

the ban that already exists

Here is the funny part, if you have a dark sense of humor. Missouri already bans gender-transition surgery for minors and bars them from starting puberty blockers or hormones, the Independent reports, and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld that law this year. The hormone and blocker ban expires in August 2027. The constitution would make it permanent. The signs are campaigning to ban a surgery that is already banned.

The money is lopsided the other way. The yes side has raised more than $1 million and the abortion-rights side close to $5 million, per The 19th, which also notes yes ads ran during a primetime Chiefs game. The abortion-rights amendment won in 2024 with 1.5 million votes, the Independent reports.

Trans kids are roughly the smallest constituency in Missouri politics, and they are carrying an entire abortion ban on their backs. Nobody asked them, and they can't vote.