David Rice of Hick Christian has written a critique of a Freedom Principle Missouri presentation about the new Amendment 3, due to be voted on in November's election.
The New A3 is still pro Abortion
A3 still allows for Abortion—95% of the abortions in this state won’t be touched at all
By David Rice
Tonight, I attended a local Missouri Republican Assembly’s meeting. They were hosting Missouri Freedom Principle’s speaker, Katie Sickles, speaking on Amendment 3.
No, not Amendment 3, from 2024, but the new 2026 Amendment 3 which is a tacky attempt to fix a terrible constitutional amendment with a bandaid. For some stats, go here.
Around 4000 women are having telehealth abortions yearly. After the Ban went into place after the Dobbs decision, Abortion nearly doubled. I covered here in my article, Sausage Factory.
Below, you can listen to Gretchen Garrity and me question Katie Sickles. Some of our questions land and some don’t. We got push back. We were alone, going into a room, where we were the outnumber twenty to two with our contrarian views. When I walked in, people saw me, and their faces dropped. It’s funny how quickly I can take the joy out of a room.
We’re abolitionists stuffed into a room of compromisers at the Nixa’s Godfather’s. Like real pepperoni on vegan pizza—so authentic that it hurts.
I recorded the whole lecture, but it’s kind of boring, but you can find the full spiel on YouTube here.
There are two ways to think about this bill. One is to argue that we still exist under the old Roe v Wade tyranny. We must win every battle, inch by inch, slowly over time.
Katie Sickles, of Missouri Freedom Principles (run by Byron Keeling who once told me I could work for him as an editor if I stopped being so Christian even on my own substack), holds we have to win this fight over time. She also holds we can trust the legislators. She held that it was only one Senator who stopped IP Reform in 2024 which would have stopped Amendment 3 from reaching the ballot. It’s a long story, but Mary Elizabeth Coleman was not the fly in the ointment. She was one person in a Super Majority Republican Senate working with Senate President Pro Tem, Caleb Rowden, to kill IP reform. I covered it here.
Bryon knows that because he asked to publish this letter and this photo on my substack then:
But now he’s running around the state trying to convince us we can trust the Senate and House again. Somehow they’re wonderful—again. His friend and co-journalist, Cary Wells, started to record Gretchen and me. I’m sure he was hoping to embarrass us.
The problem is they aren’t embarrassed that they are committing to a law which does nothing.
Amendment 3 changes almost nothing. Really.
It aims at the lowest-hanging fruit, medical restrictions and fetal anomalies, and protects them, while doing nothing really to protect children from elective abortion, telehealth abortion, out of state abortion, or abortion activist judges.
They claim that they will add parental consent, but ta-da!, it will have the Separation Clause built in so that if the courts strike down parental consent, the rest of the bill still stands.
Surely, No judge will strike down parental consent. You know. Judges always care about what’s best for children.
The law does nothing to address tyrannical judges, which rule from the bench with long terms, with no oversight. They admit judges are the issue, but don’t do anything to attempt to correct their overreach which can strip away the effectives of this amendment or any other future amendments.
Essentially, 95% of current abortions will continue with the hope that one day, Missouri legislators will grow a backbone and stop it. Or Missouri Christians will begin to vote. Or Missouri PACS will educate future children some day to not want to have abortion.
Worse, it will legalize abortion again in Missouri hospitals so that hospitals can charge for the procedure and it requires Missouri taxpayers to pay for it if it is medically necessary.
Section 36(a), subsection 2 reads exactly: “No public funds shall be expended for the purpose of performing or inducing, or otherwise assisting, any abortion.”
That’s the blanket prohibition on taxpayer funding. No exceptions listed in that subsection.
Read subsection 5 immediately after:
“A woman’s right to reproductive freedom shall include the right to health care in cases of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other medical emergencies, and the provisions of this section shall not be construed to limit a woman’s access to such health care.”
That subsection 5 creates a constitutional right to access medical emergency care without restriction. It doesn’t say “except when publicly funded.” It says the rest of the section cannot be construed to limit access to that care.
So you have subsection 2 prohibiting public funding for abortions and subsection 5 guaranteeing unrestricted access to medical emergency care — and those two provisions are in direct constitutional tension with each other. When a Medicaid-eligible woman presents with a medical emergency requiring termination, subsection 5 guarantees her access while subsection 2 purports to prohibit public funding. Courts resolving that conflict would almost certainly rule that the access guarantee in subsection 5 overrides the funding prohibition in subsection 2 for the excepted categories — because you cannot constitutionally guarantee a right and simultaneously prohibit the funding mechanism that makes it accessible for indigent patients.
That is the hidden taxpayer funding mechanism built directly into the amendment’s own text. And nobody in the campaign on either side is explaining it to Missouri voters.
That’s how it’s written. That’s how the whole thing is written. It says one thing, then says something else. Of course it needs the Separability Clause. It’s going to be challenged here, there, and everywhere.
During the above heated questioning, I proposed that the only solution is two step.
Personhood. Unequivocal personhood. Every person must be given it without exception. That would eliminate 95% of the elective abortions we have, plus more, allowing for the tiny percentage of medically necessary ones.
We must criminalize it. Women, men, doctors, nurses, and everyone else must go to prison for murder.
And yes, it sucks, and yes, it will be hard. Guess what? It will probably be so unpopular, it will cost us more than just an election or two. It might lead to a Civil War. That’s the price we were forced to pay when they made this decision 50 years ago. It gets steeper every year we put it off.
I was yelled at by a tall, balding man because no one is going to want to fund it, or create the media for it. He thinks I should come up with a magical wand and fix it. I told him I wanted smarter Christians. The problem with some people is that if you gave them a quilt, they couldn’t find the pattern.
It wasn’t that long ago that no one wanted to criminalize owning slaves. There was a time when no one criminalized beating children or wives. We have regressed to a time when Republicans are arguing that we can legalize abortion for most of the babies, just save a tiny amount.
I’ve been in the signal groups. I’ve seen what they argue. We’ll save a lot of babies.
That’s not what they presented tonight.
Tonight, they admitted that the only thing this new Amendment 3 will do is give the legislators the ability to campaign on broken promises year after year, promising to do something about abortion, but never really accomplishing anything at all.
Byron Keeling gave away the plot before the meeting when he was referencing John Adams to Carey Wells. John Adams was seen as wise during his time. Men like him treated slaves as 3/5ths of a person. They stymied those religious zealots who wanted abolition because they preferred to gradually eliminate slavery. Keeling argued that this was why we needed incrementalism.
Every compromise set up by Adams catastrophically failed, including the Missouri Compromise. Adams thought he could predict the future. He was as blind as Jefferson’s Deism.
Missouri Abortion incrementalists think they can predict the future. They can’t. It will get worse the more we throw babies on the altar. There is only one choice, and it must be terrible, final, and irrevocable. Personhood, with criminal outcomes—just like we did for slavery. It’s not radical, unless it was and is for slavery.
Byron—That’s moral cowardice. Eventually, someone will demand payment from the empty shells of men who puff out their chests—but they lack conviction. Their shells will crack, and no one will pick up the pieces. Keeling is a hollow-shaped egg man, sitting on the walls of little kingdoms, courting tiny men with no power, all while lacking any internal substance.
We will absolutely pay for it in blood and more death than we can imagine. The Civil War was horrendous.
What will come from Moloch’s altars will be far worse, and we act as we can incrementally make deals with Moloch. Just a little Moloch.
Did you know that in Missouri, 11% of our residents are Black, yet 48% of our abortions are of Black babies? At what point do we stop punting the problem down the road into the lives of poor whites or minority groups while we act outraged in our White Protestant Churches?
I have one final point of contention. Katie Sickles referenced a poll in which over 80% of Protestants and over 80% of Lutherans voted against A3 in 2024, but only 52% of Catholics did.
The reason A3 lost by implication? Catholics. Is the Senator to blame for IP reform failing? A Catholic again!
Those damn Catholics.
Here are some demographics.
Out of the 6M people in Missouri, roughly 16% are Catholic, so about 960K.
58% of the state is Protestant. I’m not sure why she separated Lutherans from Protestants. I doubt she’s a historian, but Lutherans are Protestants. That’s roughly 3,480,000 Protestants.
Amendment 3 passed by a margin of about 95,000 votes — a margin of about 3.2%. KSDK The total votes cast works out to roughly 2.97 million, split approximately:
Yes: ~1,535,000 (51.7%)
No: ~1,440,000 (48.3%)
Simply, there aren’t enough Catholics on their own to have passed A3. Even if every Catholic voted no or yes as a block. But that’s not what her poll, which she doesn’t link to or share the source for, says.
Of the people that responded, the ones who were Catholic, 52% voted no on it. Was that 20 people? 500? 2000?
But she’s repeating it on Facebook, YouTube, and in meetings across the state.
Those damn Catholics who can’t vote.
Do you know who formed the first prolife groups? Catholics, unambigiously, Catholics.
Protestants were still struggling with when life began when I was at Seminary in 2002. I was at the largest Protestant Seminary in the world, by size if not by prestige, and they hadn’t answered the question. In 1973, W.A. Criswell was still claiming life didn’t begin until after a child was born...
...Notice who is sponsoring Katie Sickles going around talking about this supposed prolife bill: