T-shirts promoting an amendment that would ban nearly all abortions, with exceptions for rape and incest survivors and for medical emergencies, are laid out on a table during an event promoting Amendment 3 (Photo provided by Big Lake Studio).
Three months before Missourians narrowly voted to legalize abortion, a small group led by Tom Estes gathered in a living room and came up with a plan.
The effort that emerged — MO Protects — was improvised, underfunded and, by its own telling, forced to make up for a fractured statewide campaign with volunteer labor and little money.
That narrow defeat is now shaping a much more organized rematch. The activists who tried and failed to defeat the 2024 abortion-rights amendment have regrouped under a new PAC, called “Her Health, Her Future,” betting that more time, tighter coordination and earlier backing from top Missouri Republicans can help them succeed in 2026.
“So far, we are very, very happy about how unified the campaign is and how just eager everybody is to work together,” said Estes, a mid-Missouri pastor and chief of staff to state Sen. Rick Brattin. “And look, it also makes it easier for everybody to want to work together when we just lost when we were working separately. So everybody’s very motivated and very unified.”
In 2024, Luke Schrandt, who served on MO Protects’ leadership team, said he put 15,000 miles on a borrowed truck delivering yard signs and fliers urging voters to reject the abortion-rights amendment.
“None of us got paid a single dime,” said Schrandt, who also serves as policy director for state Sen. Mike Moon. “We knew we were fighting a probably insurmountable challenge.”
By Election Day, anti-abortion groups had been outspent 10 to 1. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the campaign behind the reproductive-rights amendment, raised more than $31 million. The amendment still passed with just under 52% of the vote.
To Schrandt and Estes, that result was less proof the fight was unwinnable than evidence their side had come together too late.
“I think if some of the larger Pro-Life donors would have known how close it would have been, we would have gotten some of the bigger checks, but we didn’t get any of the bigger checks,” Schrandt said. “Because a lot of people thought that it was going to be impossible, that we were going to lose by a lot. And it was sad to lose. It was even sadder to lose knowing that, had we had some more resources, we probably could have won.”
Estes said the biggest advantage this year is time. Legal battles over the 2024 measure, he said, kept abortion-rights opponents from knowing until August that it would even be on the ballot, leaving only a few months to mount a statewide campaign.
He has since folded MO Protects into Her Health, Her Future, a PAC launched in September that is now trying to serve as that central hub. The campaign’s website features endorsements from a roster of prominent Republican officeholders and anti-abortion groups in Missouri. So far, Her Health, Her Future has raised about $105,000.
That still trails the opposition. Stop the Ban, the campaign seeking to preserve the current abortion-rights amendment, has raised more than $1 million this election cycle. A spokesperson for the campaign — which includes Planned Parenthood, the ACLU of Missouri and Abortion Action Missouri — declined to comment for this story.
But anti-abortion organizers say donors are more likely to give now that the effort looks less scattered.
“It was hard for donors to get a lot of confidence to give their funds last time when the campaign was just so segmented.” Estes said, noting the lack of a central command structure two years ago.
The proposed ban, which was approved by the legislature in May 2025 and will appear on the November ballot, would outlaw all abortions with exceptions for medical emergencies and for survivors of rape and incenst who seek out an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Like 2024’s abortion-rights amendment, the abortion ban amendment will also be listed on the ballot as Amendment 3.
One notable difference this time around is the involvement of Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe’s office from the outset.
State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Republican from Moberly who helped draft the proposed abortion ban last spring, said while former Gov. Mike Parson publicly opposed abortion rights ahead of the 2024 election, he did not play as active a role in the campaign.
“But you know, you have to not just be against it, you have to plant your name, and lend your bully pulpit to that, and this governor and his wife appear to be taking a more active lead,” Lewis said.
Last year, Her Health, Her Future PAC announced Missouri First Lady Claudia Kehoe would serve as campaign treasurer, attaching the governor’s name to the cause.
At that point, the governor’s office had been involved in the amendment effort for months, as lawmakers proposed and then approved the abortion ban for the statewide ballot.
As negotiations over which version of an abortion ban to move forward with were underway last session, Kehoe dropped by state Sen. Adam Schnelting’s office on several occasions asking for updates on the drafted amendment.
Sherry Kuttenkuler, who now serves as Schnelting’s chief of staff, said the governor’s involvement is one of the biggest advantages she sees this time around. The lieutenant governor, the secretary of state, attorney general, along with Senate and House leadership, all lined up behind him.
“That doesn’t happen,” Kuttenkuler said. “I’ve never been part of an effort like this one where just out of clear blue sky, Kehoe drops in and says, ‘how’s it going?’”
In the days after winning the gubernatorial race, Kehoe told St. Louis Public Radio that he believed in some abortion exceptions, and that he hoped lawmakers would take the election results as a sign to re-consider exceptions for rape and incest.
In June 2022, Missouri became the first state to outlaw nearly all abortions, with limited exceptions for medical emergencies, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Then in November 2024, Missouri became the first state to overturn an abortion ban through a statewide vote. That reproductive rights amendment protects the right to abortion up until the point of fetal viability.
While abortion is legal in Missouri, only procedural abortions, which take place in clinics, are available. Medication abortion, which is increasingly the most common way to end a pregnancy, is not available due to several abortion regulations that remain on the books. A lawsuit attempting to strike down these regulations is ongoing, with a decision expected to come down in the coming months.
In her spare time, Kuttenkuler travels around the state giving presentations on the abortion ban amendment, at times encountering Missourians who voted in favor of President Donald Trump and the abortion rights amendment.
“They really do believe that it’s more compassionate and loving to allow a victim of rape and incest to get an abortion than it is to ask them to carry that baby to term and give it up for adoption,” she said.
There are 500 4-by-8-foot “Yes on 3” yard signs stacked in Kuttenkuler’s garage next to her BMW. As soon as the legislative session concludes in mid-May, she said it will be “all hands on deck” to distribute them around the state.
That ground game in 2024 was led in large part by Missouri Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group.
Last fall, the Missouri Right to Life PAC formally announced a partnership with the Missouri GOP and the hiring of political strategist Jessica Flanagain to help lead their campaign efforts.
“With their organizational strength and our expansive pro-life infrastructure, we are building an unstoppable coalition,” Missouri Right to Life president Steve Rupp said during an event in St. Charles whose speaker line-up included Laura Trump.
Flanagain helped lead Nebraska’s anti-abortion movement to success at the polls in 2024 when voters, faced with two opposing abortion proposals on the ballot, approved an abortion-restrictions amendment and rejected an abortion-rights amendment.
She recently stepped down as political consultant for Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen a day after law enforcement announced an investigation into a state contract led by Pillen, the Nebraska Examiner reported.
Leadership with Missouri Right to Life declined comment. But Schrandt of MO Protects said the group’s membership and organizing capacity could make it one of the most valuable pieces of the 2026 effort.
“They have a lot of members. They’ve got a lot of people that are willing to go out and go to work,” Schrandt said. “A lot of the Missouri Right to Life folks were the ones that were going and doing the ground game, and I believe that’s where Missouri Right to Life will be effective in the next campaign.”
With the 2024 result so close — and with polling suggesting another tight contest could be ahead — organizers on both sides are treating every vote as consequential.
Schrandt, through his work in Moon’s Senate office, said he is familiar with abortion abolitionists, or those who don’t believe any exceptions should be allowed. He said while he believes these activists have good intentions, he’s not worried that those divisions will damage the November effort.
“I’ll do what I can to convince my peers, and the people that I know in my community, to vote for life,” he said. “ And past that, I’m going to leave it up to the Lord, just like I did the last one.”