Columbia, MO — When abortions resumed in March 2025 at the Planned Parenthood facility in Columbia, Missouri, it was for the first time in nearly seven years — long before the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision in 2022 that struck down Roe v. Wade and allowed states to once again criminalize abortion. Tragically, surgical abortions continue at that Missouri clinic today.

However, the reasons Columbia was abortion-free for seven years — and why it still may be again — gives hope that damage done by pro-abortion political initiatives that recently dominated ballot boxes in ten states can be undone.

“The danger of these pro-abortion ballot initiatives is that they nullify pro-life laws that protect public safety and save lives. They allow abortion mills to operate under dangerous conditions without accountability,” says Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “In Missouri, back-alley style abortion clinics are open for business.”

Strongly Pro-Life

Missouri has long been known as a stalwart pro-life state with some of the best legislation in the nation protecting mothers and their unborn babies. On October, 24, 2017, the Missouri Legislature passed life-saving requirements that set up abortion clinic guidelines in the interest of public safety.  This set of laws included the following:

• Licensing requirements for abortion facilities.
• Requirement that only a licensed physician could conduct abortions.
• Informed consent requirements.
• A 72-hour reflection period to guard against hasty or coerced abortions.
• Gestational limits on abortions.
• Requirement that abortionists maintain nearby hospital privileges.

These important laws contributed to a 54 percent reduction in the number of abortions over the following year, as reported by Operation Rescue.

Due to those laws, abortions were completely halted at the Columbia Planned Parenthood, which had been cited by health inspectors for conducting abortions using a dirty suction machine with moldy tubing along with a myriad of other infection control and patient safety violations.

Nearby Hospital Privileges

But the regulation that may have ultimately kept abortions from resuming in Columbia was the requirement for abortionists to maintain hospital privileges within 15 minutes of the facility where they were conducting the grisly life-ending procedures.

Columbia doctors were reluctant to work as abortionists in their own college town with a moderate population of around 125,000 at that time. That meant Planned Parenthood had to recruit out-of-town abortionists who would travel to Columbia, stay for a few hours conducting abortions, then leave at the end of their shifts, making them unavailable when an abortion-related medical emergency arose.  This placed women’s lives at risk.

The hospital privilege requirement put an end to the dangerous “circuit rider” practice and helped keep Columbia abortion free.

So successful was Missouri’s package of pro-life laws, that after the Dobbs decision, Missouri became one of the first abortion-free states.

Then, in November 2024, everything changed.

Amendment 3 Debacle

Missourians voted in favor of Amendment 3, a pro-abortion initiative that enshrined the “right” to abortion in the state’s constitution. Pro-life defenders were outspent 8-1 during the campaign. That vote gave Missouri the dubious distinction of being the first state to overrule an active statewide prohibition on abortions.

Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, the two abortion organizations operating in Missouri, sued to nullify the set of 2017 pro-life laws that interfered with their ability to kill babies in the womb. A court agreed and issued an injunction that prohibited the state from enforcing those provisions.

Four months after Amendment 3 was passed, and the hospital privilege requirement was nullified, the Columbia Planned Parenthood conducted its first surgical abortions in nearly seven years.

On October 25, 2025, a state appellate court upheld the lower court’s injunction, ensuring those life-saving laws will not be enforced.

However, because Planned Parenthood filed an inadequate plan for handling complications, which was rejected by the Department of Health and Senior Services, no abortion facility in Missouri, including the Columbia Planned Parenthood, is allowed to prescribe chemical abortions at this time.

Circuit Riders Are Back in Business

Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which operates the Columbia facility, is sending abortionists from Kansas, 140 miles away — none of which hold known hospital privileges in Columbia. Driving time from Overland Park, Kansas, to Columbia, Missouri, is two hours, 15 minutes — two hours longer than Missouri’s hospital privilege requirement would have allowed.

Abortionists known to have conducted abortions at the Columbia Planned Parenthood this year include the following:

• Iman Alsaden, Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood Great Plains, headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. Alsaden is associated with the radical abortion group Physicians for Reproductive Choice. Alsaden pleaded guilty to charges of disturbing the peace while intoxicated in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2010.
• Selina Sandoval, Associate Medical Director at Planned Parenthood Great Plains. Sandoval also oversees abortion training for fellows, residents, and medical students. Her Planned Parenthood online profile bizarrely indicates that she enjoys “protecting her skin.” Unfortunately, she does not give unborn babies the same consideration.
• Noria McCarther is an abortionist associated with the University of Kansas and participated in a Maternal-Fetal Medicine fellowship at KU Medical Center.

Hope For the Future

“If there is one thing we have come to know about the pro-life people of Missouri, it is that they possess a great deal of ingenuity and tenacity,” says Newman. “They don’t have it in them to give up.”

A new referendum has been approved by the legislature that will put abortion back on the ballot in November 2026 — this time for the benefit of women and babies, and not to line the pockets of abortionists.

If successful, the new initiative will repeal Amendment 3 and provide strong protections for women from shoddy abortions.

“This new Missouri amendment could serve as a template to overturning pro-abortion initiatives in other states. I vigorously support this amendment and urge pro-lifers everywhere to work and pray for its passage,” says Newman. “We can also expect more states to launch pro-abortion referendums as well, which will nullify pro-life safety laws and illegitimately ensconce abortion as a so-called constitutional right. If we put our shoulders to the wheel, we can push back the pro-abortion darkness and restore the right to life for all babies in the womb.”

This article was originally published by Operation Rescue, a leading pro-life, Christian activist organization dedicated to exposing abortion abuses, demanding enforcement, saving innocent lives, and building an abortion-free America. The author, Cheryl Sullenger, is Operation Rescue Sr. Vice President Emeritus.