Eric Schmitt’s campaign tried to get ad featuring woman denied abortion pulled from air
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s campaign for U.S. Senate last week sent a cease-and-desist letter to a cable provider demanding the company remove a television ad that featured a woman describing how she was denied a medical abortion because of the state’s ban.
The letter was addressed to Spectrum Reach, which covers a broad swath of Missouri. It was sent by Edward Greim, an attorney for the Kansas City-based law firm Graves Garrett, which represents Schmitt’s campaign.
The campaign’s cease-and-desist letter, obtained by The Star, was referenced in a series of letters sent by House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, to the offices of Schmitt, Gov. Mike Parson and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Quade’s letters sought records related to an alleged investigation by the state health department into the woman and the Joplin hospital where she was denied the abortion.
The letter from Schmitt’s campaign takes aim at an ad paid for by his Democratic opponent Trudy Busch Valentine, who has centered her campaign around abortion rights.
The ad featured Mylissa Farmer, a Joplin resident who was denied a life-saving abortion procedure at Joplin’s Freeman Hospital in August after her water broke early and put her health at risk, the Springfield News-Leader previously reported. She was forced to travel to Illinois to have an abortion because of Missouri’s near-total ban on the procedure, which Schmitt triggered minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
“My Missouri doctors weren’t allowed to give me the care that I needed all because of the mandate Eric Schmitt put into place,” Farmer says in the ad. “Eric Schmitt doesn’t care about women like me.”
Greim’s letter argued that the ad included at least two false and defamatory statements about the state’s abortion ban. First, the letter rebukes the ad’s argument that the abortion ban “could send women and doctors to jail.”
The letter points out that Missouri’s abortion ban states that women who have abortions will not be prosecuted. However, the law does state that any person who knowingly performs or induces an abortion shall be guilty of a felony and could face the suspension or revocation of their medical license.
Greim’s letter also rebukes the ad’s statement that the abortion ban does not have an exception for “health of the mother.”
The law, which does not include exceptions for rape and incest, is supposed to allow abortions in cases of “medical emergencies.” However, abortion rights activists and doctors have said the law is too vague and forces women to carry unsafe pregnancies or travel out of state for the procedure. They also say the ban puts an unnecessary strain on doctors tasked with performing an abortion to save a woman’s life.
Quade, in the series of letters on Thursday, said that within days of the cease-and-desist letter, she was told that the state had launched an investigation into Freeman Hospital and potentially into Farmer. In an interview with The Star Thursday, Quade said she learned of the alleged investigation from a whistleblower.
“The timing of this investigation is suspicious and concerning to say the least, and suggests that the substantial taxpayer-funded investigative power of state government is being weaponized against citizens for political retaliation,” Quade wrote in the letters.
Asked about the alleged investigation, Marianna Deal, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office in an email directed The Star to DHSS for comment.
“Our office is not involved,” Deal said in the email.
Gov. Mike Parson’s office, DHSS, Schmitt’s campaign for U.S. Senate and representatives from Graves Garrett did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Quade told The Star that the alleged investigation illustrates the vagueness and confusion surrounding Missouri’s ban on abortion.
“It’s just continuing to add to a very scary time for a lot of Missourians,” she said.
