In the days before Missourians voted to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, incoming House Speaker Jon Patterson declared lawmakers should respect the people’s choice, whatever the outcome.
Now, with abortion set to become legal in Missouri, Republican Rep. Justin Sparks of Wildwood is mounting a long-shot challenge seeking to block Patterson from the top leadership position in the Missouri House, arguing that he is not up for the job of defending anti-abortion values.
“On day one, your speaker must address and tackle Amendment 3,” Sparks said Sunday on a Facebook live video, foreshadowing future legislative battles over abortion.
Sparks in an interview Monday said he’s been “humbled” by the support he’s already received.
Patterson, a Lee’s Summit Republican, declined comment.
Amendment 3, which won with 51.7% of the nearly 3 million votes cast, goes into effect on Dec. 5. At that point lawmakers won’t be allowed to restrict abortion prior to fetal viability, generally seen as the time toward the end of the second trimester when a fetus can survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical interventions.
The amendment also protects “the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive health care, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care and respectful birthing conditions.”
During a Lee’s Summit Chamber candidate forum in late October, Patterson said while he didn’t support Amendment 3, the legislature should respect the voters’ will if it passed.
“It will be the law of the land,” he said at the time. “And we have to go forward as the people decide.”
Patterson added that the abortion ban wasn’t working for Missouri. In an interview with The Independent the following day, Paterson clarified that he was referring to the state’s “total ban” on abortion, which didn’t include exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.
“Missourians are telling us they want compromise,” he said.
On Sunday, Sparks repeated Patterson’s words.
“That’s not what the leader of the Republican caucus should be saying, guys,” Sparks said in the video.
The speaker of the House is in charge of appointing committee members and chairs, assigning legislation to committees and ruling on points of order raised during debate in the House Chamber, among other legislative duties.
It is considered the most powerful leadership position in the General Assembly.
Patterson, who currently serves as House majority leader, was tapped last year to be the next speaker by the 111-member House GOP caucus. But he will not officially become speaker until January, when his promotion is ratified by the full House at the start of the legislative session.
Sparks complained Sunday that, as majority leader, Patterson refused to allow one of his bills seeking to counter Amendment 3 to come up for debate in the House.
Sparks has filed a handful of other anti-abortion bills during his short tenure in the House, including one that would’ve prevented Missouri medical students from learning or traveling to other states for “abortion-specific training,” and another that would have prohibited fetal tissue or organs from elective abortions from being used for research. He also proposed a second constitutional amendment that would have asked Missourians if they wanted to grant fetal personhood to embryos and fetuses.
Those bill did not progress far.
But Sparks believes an abortion amendment will successfully be pushed through in the 2025 session.
He plans to “tackle Amendment 3” by pre-filing a constitutional amendment that would provide voters an opportunity to vote to put further restrictions on abortion.
Asked what those restrictions might include, Sparks said he and other Republicans across the House and Senate are still narrowing down specifics.
“What we don’t want, clearly, is a poorly-written constitutional amendment that provides an abortion sanctuary state … ” Sparks said, adding: “We need to define what we’re talking about when we address Amendment 3, and obviously we need to go back to the voters so ultimately they can decide.”
Sparks was just elected to his second term in the Missouri House. He represents a district in St. Louis County — a county where more than 67% of voters were in favor of Amendment 3 and more than 60% voted in support of both Democrats Kamala Harris for president and Lucas Kunce for U.S. Senate.
Patterson was just elected to his fourth term. His House district sits in Jackson County, which voted in support of Amendment 3.
A number of Republican lawmakers and elected officials have said they are exploring ways to overturn Amendment 3.
In 2019, Patterson voted in favor of the trigger law that was later enacted in June 2022, making Missouri the first state to ban abortion minutes after Roe v. Wade fell.
While Sparks did not mention Patterson’s voting record on abortion, he did bring up that Patterson was among three Republicans to vote against the SAFE Act, which banned transgender youth from starting gender-affirming care.
Sparks added that if he were speaker, he would also work to decentralize the power of the speaker’s office; prohibit chairmanships and committee positions from being purchased with money; and “address the unelected bureaucratic administrative state.”
This story from the Missouri Independent is published on KSDK.com under the Creative Commons license. The Missouri Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization covering state government, politics and policy.
