This is the first of many exhortations I have for Pro-life Missourians to unite in support of Amendment 3 to the Missouri Constitution, which will be on the general election ballot this fall.

The Republican Party is and always has been the party of life. Protecting human life and human dignity are key and foundational principles of our party. On August 17, 1858, at his speech in Lewistown, our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, said that the Declaration of Independence implied a call to recognize the moral worth and inviolate rights of all human beings. He said:

“This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to ALL His creatures, to the whole great family of man.  In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”

The question of whether we should protect unborn children is the question of whether any of our lives matter and whether human life is worth protecting at all. We in the Pro-life community say “Yes.” Human life is invaluable. It still means something. There is a right to life, not a right to take life. Life is worth protecting. Unborn children are living human beings, and, therefore, their lives are worth protecting.

More than a century after Lincoln, President Ronald Reagan returned to Lincoln’s argument in his eloquent and moving 1984 book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. Reagan quoted this very passage and applied Lincoln’s principle of universal human dignity to the unborn.

“We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.”

President Reagan also said: “The real question today is not when human life begins, but what is the value of human life?”

In 2026, Missouri voters will have a chance to answer that question.

In 2024, Missouri voters decided to put abortion rights in the Missouri Constitution. The effect of that provision has been abhorrent. In Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains v. Missouri, a Jackson County judge invalidated Missouri’s Heartbeat Bill and a sweeping range of the statutory protections for unborn life that Missouri had enacted over decades. Addressing Missouri’s law, Judge Jerri Zhang concluded that its plain language was “directly at odds with Amendment 3.” In June 2026, following a ten-day trial earlier this year, the court went substantially further, invalidating numerous statutory protections for unborn children and mothers including Missouri’s gestational restrictions, waiting period, significant abortion-facility regulations, and restrictions involving medication abortion and telemedicine.

I do not want there to be a constitutional right to abortion in the Missouri Constitution. However, that is currently what we have. The 2026 Amendment 3 therefore cannot fairly be measured against an ideal; it must be considered in the face of our harsh reality. The reality is that Missouri is now legally one of the most pro-abortion states in the country, and our next opportunity to change that is the 2026 Amendment 3 on the upcoming ballot.

The choice in November is between the status quo, which I find completely intolerable, and an opportunity to restore Missouri’s ability to protect unborn human life.

More than fifty years ago, Justice Byron White warned of exactly the danger we now face. White was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President John F. Kennedy. When the Supreme Court constitutionalized abortion in Roe v. Wade, Justice White dissented.

He called the Court’s decision an “exercise of raw judicial power.” Justice White said that the Court was “interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life.”

The Court in Roe found such a barrier implicitly in the United States Constitution. Today, the Missouri Constitution contains that barrier explicitly and immovably. As the Jackson County litigation has demonstrated, it goes much further than striking down Missouri’s Heartbeat Bill.

The 2024 Amendment 3 placed a constitutional barrier between the people of Missouri and our ability, through our elected representatives, to protect unborn human life. The 2026 Amendment 3 gives us an opportunity to remove that barrier.

My first priority is to restore Missouri to a Pro-life state. In my opinion, Amendment 3 is the best opportunity we have before us to do so.

I believe we should fight to save every innocent human life. Right now, Missouri law offers virtually no protection for our unborn children.

I am asking each of us to vote to change that.

I am voting yes on Amendment 3 in November, and I am asking you to do the same.

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