ST. LOUIS —
Congresswoman Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis and St. Louis County, is ramping up her attacks against her primary challenger Wesley Bell, St. Louis County's prosecuting attorney.
Bush's latest fundraising push questions Bell's commitment to protecting abortion. When Bush officially launched her bid for a third term, she sounded an alarm by warning her supporters she'd need to raise a lot of money to beat Bell.
Recent texts Bush has sent to supporters claim Bell "won't commit to protecting our reproductive rights...".
Is the claim true? We dug into the facts to VERIFY.
The question
Will Wesley Bell not commit to protecting reproductive rights if elected?
Our sources
- Cori Bush's campaign
- Wesley Bell
- U.S. Supreme Court documents
- Records from the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office
- Previous St. Louis Post Dispatch articles
- The KSDK archive
- Federal Election Commission
The answer
Wesley Bell has confirmed to 5 On Your Side that he commits to protecting reproductive rights. The candidate's past political actions also back up this commitment.
What we found
Cori Bush's campaign told 5 On Your Side their claim is based on a 2019 article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that asked whether Missouri women would face felonies for performing abortions on themselves. Three years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, Missouri Republicans were drafting a plan to charge women who seek abortion procedures with felonies.
Bell replied to the reporter writing the story and defended abortion access, saying:
"Roe v. Wade is the law of the land and has been settled law since 1973. It is infuriating that this fundamental constitutional principle — and the humanity of women — is being put into play for political purposes.”
How could Bell's defense of abortion rights amount to a refusal to commit to protecting them? Bush's campaign pointed to a line in the article that said neither Bell nor former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner directly answered the question of whether prosecutors would enforce the then-pending abortion law.
Bush has also previously pointed to Bell's campaign donors to bolster her case that Bell won't protect abortion access.
Bush and her campaign have suggested that because Bell accepts financial support from AIPAC (The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), and because AIPAC accepts contributions from Republicans, then Bell must also share the views of all of AIPAC's donors.
Federal campaign finance records show AIPAC has given sizable contributions to almost every Democrat in Congress, including House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and every member of the House Democratic leadership team. Bush has not applied the same critique to her colleagues on the Hill, only to the Democrat running against her.
"No candidate knows 100% of the beliefs and positions of their donors," Bell replied. "But 100% of the folks who support and donate to me know my positions, and my positions are that I stand with women's reproductive rights and rights to an abortion."
Bush's campaign could provide no other evidence that Bell has ever opposed abortion or refused to commit to protecting access to the procedure.
We asked Planned Parenthood and Abortion Action Missouri, two pro-choice advocacy groups who have endorsed Bush for re-election, if Bell gave them any indication in their vetting process that he wouldn't support their agenda. Neither group responded.
Bell has not only verbally committed to protecting abortion access numerous times since 2019, but he has actively opposed efforts to restrict abortion access.
Bell signed onto a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court filing writing that if the Roe decision was overturned, the court "will put at risk the health and safety of all people who can bear children, particularly women of color and low-income women." Then, when the court overturned Roe the following year, Bell refused to enforce Missouri state law, specifically what Bush claims he wouldn't commit to doing.
To be sure Bell's stance on abortion hasn't changed since then, we asked him ourselves.
"Will you commit to protecting reproductive rights?" Mark Maxwell asked Bell Friday morning.
"Absolutely," Bell said. "It's disappointing that the congresswoman would say something that she knows is a lie. She knows that it's false. And, to me, I don't care about the attacks. Politics, that's part of it, the nature of the beast. But this movement for women's reproductive rights, for women to have autonomy over their body, should be bigger, in my opinion, than petty political games, and trying to make a few bucks. I think this issue is too important."
We can VERIFY: Wesley Bell will commit to protecting reproductive rights if elected.
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