Liam Conner
San Carlos, Missouri – Democrat Lucas Kunce is trying to impose restrictions on reproductive care on the senator. Josh Hawleybetting that it will increase his chances of unseating the Republican incumbent in November.
In a recent advertising campaign, Kunce accuses Hawley of compromising reproductive care, including IVF. Looking directly into the camera, with tears in her eyes, a Missouri mother identified only as Jessica tells how she struggled for years to get pregnant.
“There are now efforts to ban IVF, and Josh Hawley started them,” says Jessica. “I want Josh Hawley to look me in the eye and tell me I can’t have the son I deserve.”
Never mind that IVF is legal in Missouri, or that Hawley has said he supports limited access to abortion as a “pro-life” Republican. In key races across the country, Democrats cast their Republican rivals as threats to women’s health following a broad erosion of reproductive rights since the The Supreme Court overturned Roe v.including almost all state abortion bansefforts to restrict medical abortion and a court ruling that limited in vitro fertilization in alabama.
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In addition to messaging campaigns, Democrats hope ballot measures to guarantee abortion rights in up to 13 states — including Missouri, Arizona and Florida — will help swing turnout in their favor.
The issue puts the Republican Party on the defensive, he said J. Miles Colemanelection analyst at the University of Virginia.
“I really don’t think Republicans have found a great way to respond to this yet,” he said.
Abortion is such an important issue in Arizona, for example, that election analysts say a Republican-held U.S. House seat Juan Ciscomani and now one bid.
Hawley appears to be in less danger, for now. He holds a wide lead in the polls, although Kunce surpassed him in the most recent quarter, raising $2.25 million in donations, compared with the current president’s $846,000, according to campaign finance reports. Still, Hawley’s war chest is twice as big as Kunce’s.
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Kunce, a Navy veteran and antitrust advocate, said he likes his odds.
“I just don’t think we’re going to lose,” he told KFF Health News. “Missourians want freedom and the ability to control their own lives.”
Hawley’s campaign declined to comment. He supported a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks and said he supports exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the lives of pregnant women. Missouri’s state ban is almost total, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
“This is Josh Hawley’s life mission. It’s your family business,” Kunce said, a nod to Erin Morrow Hawleythe senator’s wife, a lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court in March on behalf of activists who sought to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
State abortion rights have won everywhere they have been on the ballot since the end of Roe in 2022, including in Republican-led Kentucky and Ohio.
An abortion rights ballot initiative is also expected in Montana, where a Republican challenge to the Democratic Party Jon Tester could decide control of the Senate.
On a late April Saturday along historic Main Street in St. Charles, Missouri, people holding makeshift clipboards made from past election signs invited local residents strolling the brick sidewalks to sign a petition for the initiative to be voted in Missouri. Nearby, diners ate lunch on a patio hidden beneath a canopy of trees in this affluent St. Louis suburb.
Missouri was the first state to ban abortion after the fall of Roe; is prohibited except in “cases of medical emergency”. The measure would add the right to abortion to the state constitution.
Larry Bax, 65, of St. Charles County, said he votes Republican most of the time but signed the election petition along with his wife, Debbie Bax, 66.
“We have never been voters for a single issue. Never in our lifetime,” he said. “It made us a unique problem because this is so wrong.”
They won’t vote for Hawley this fall, they said, but they’re not sure they’ll support the Democratic candidate.
Jim Seidel, 64, who lives in Wright City, 50 miles west of St. Louis, also signed the petition. He said he believes Missourians deserve the opportunity to vote on the issue.
“I’ve been a Republican my whole life, until recently,” Seidel said. “It got really crazy.”
He plans to vote for Kunce in November if he wins the Democratic primary in August, as appears likely. Seidel has previously voted for some Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Claire McCaskill, whom Hawley removed as senator six years ago.
“Most of the time,” he added, Hawley is “strongly in the wrong camp.”
For about two hours in conservative St. Charles, KFF Health News observed just one person actively refusing to sign the petition. The woman told the volunteers that she and her family opposed abortion rights and quickly walked away. The Catholic Church discouraged voters from signing. In St. Joseph Parish in a nearby suburb, for example, a sign flashed: “Refuse to sign reproductive health petition!”
Organizers of the ballot measure turned in more than double the required number of signatures on May 3 and are now awaiting certification from the Secretary of State’s office.
Larry Bax’s concerns go beyond abortion and the Missouri ballot measure. He worries about more government limits on reproductive care, like in vitro fertilization or birth control. “How much further can this reach extend?” he said.
Kunce is counting on enough voters who feel like Bax and Seidel to suffer a flip similar to the one that occurred in 2012 for the same seat — also because of abortion. McCaskill defeated Republican Todd Akin that year, in large part because of his infamous response when asked about abortion: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of trying to stop all of that.”
KFF Health Newsformerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the major operating programs of the KFF — the independent source of research, polls and journalism on health policy.
