MO health department investigating hospital at center of abortion-related campaign ad
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is investigating a Joplin hospital where a woman said she was denied a medical abortion because of the state’s ban on the procedure, a situation which has gained a close focus in the race for U.S. Senate.
Lisa Cox, a spokesperson for DHSS, said in an email Monday that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services authorized the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act investigation of the hospital on Oct. 20. Cox confirmed the investigation was of the hospital and not Mylissa Farmer, the woman who said she was denied an abortion.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a 1986 federal law, prohibits hospitals with emergency departments from refusing to treat people with an emergency medical condition.
Cox said she could not provide any further information.
The investigation was launched the same day that Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s campaign for U.S. Senate sent a cease-and-desist letter to a cable provider demanding the company remove a television ad featuring the woman. The ad was paid for by Schmitt’s Democratic opponent Trudy Busch Valentine, who has centered her campaign around abortion rights.
Busch Valentine, in a statement provided by her campaign, said that she felt the investigation was politically motivated.
“It seems awfully convenient to me that on the same day career politician Eric Schmitt tried to silence Mylissa Farmer from sharing her deeply personal experience under his extreme anti-abortion mandate that the State of Missouri would also launch an official investigation into the circumstances surrounding her heartbreaking case,” the statement said.
“We have the First Amendment for a reason, and no Missourian should have to live in fear of any public official or agency weaponizing our government to retaliate against them or harass them through politically motivated intimidation or for any other reason. This is a gross abuse of taxpayer resources.”
House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, first referenced the investigation last week in a series of letters sent to the offices of Schmitt, Gov. Mike Parson and DHSS. She alleged that the investigation was politically motivated.
Quade’s letters said DHSS had launched an investigation into the hospital, a part of Freeman Health System, and potentially into Mylissa Farmer, the woman who was denied the abortion.
Farmer, a Joplin resident, was denied a life-saving abortion procedure at the Joplin 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.
Quade, in her letters said the timing of the investigation and the cease-and-desist letter was suspicious.
“The people of Missouri deserve to know whether their government is using their taxpayer dollars to subject private citizens to harassment for doing nothing more than exercising free speech, and for something as blatantly unlawful as benefitting the political campaigns of certain elected officials,” Quade wrote in the letters.
“They and their providers also deserve to know whether any Missouri woman or girl’s personal health care records can now be subjected to invasive, targeted scrutiny by your office or any other agency of state government without sufficient reason.”
Schmitt’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
