Mark Lee Dickson, founder of Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn based in Texas, spoke before the Rolla City Council on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025, about an ordinance that would outlaw the mailing of abortion medication in the Missouri town (Screenshot/City of Rolla Youtube page).
Less than a month after a state constitutional amendment legalizing abortion went into effect, a national movement to establish pockets of resistance is dividing one Missouri town.
Rolla, a town of about 20,000 people that sits 100 miles southwest of St. Louis, is being courted by Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, an anti-abortion activist group out of Texas. If approved by the city council, it would be the first municipality in Missouri to adopt the title.
But during a public hearing Monday night, council members expressed concerns about adopting the ordinance, which uses a 150-year-old federal law to give local citizens the ability to sue any person or entity who provides abortion medication. The concern is it would do little besides put the town at the center of costly litigation and negative national press.
“Why are we doing this?” Rolla Mayor Louis Magdits IV asked during Monday’s meeting. “What is out to be accomplished?”
Rolla is home to one of Missouri’s six remaining Planned Parenthood clinics. The rest are located in and around Democrat-leaning cities Columbia, Kansas City and St. Louis.
Wright City, a town of about 5,000 people just off Interstate 70, west of St. Louis, also considered becoming a sanctuary city for the unborn in 2023 but never made it official.
Missouri’s legal landscape around abortion has changed drastically since then.
Amendment 3, which was narrowly approved by voters in November, made unconstitutional the state’s trigger law, which in June 2022 outlawed all abortions in the state, with exceptions only for medical emergencies.
Under Amendment 3, Missourians have a constitutional right to reproductive health care, including abortion up until the point of fetal viability.
Abortions have not yet re-started in Missouri, though. Planned Parenthood is currently suing the state in an effort to take down its existing laws regulating abortion that they say make it impossible for clinics to offer the procedure.
As the fight over Amendment 3 plays out in court, anti-abortion advocates hope to wage a separate campaign at the local level. And Rolla was their first stop.
Missouri judge strikes down abortion ban, but clinics say access remains blocked
Rolla City Councilman Joshua Vroman, who filed the “sanctuary city” ordinance, said it doesn’t question the validity of Amendment 3, but rather makes note of an 1873 federal law on the books that bans mailing obscene material, including for the use of abortion.
He worked on the latest draft of the ordinance with Brian Westbrook, with St. Louis-based Coalition Life, and Mark Lee Dickson, founder of Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn.
The Comstock Act outlaws the mailing of “obscene or crime-inciting” materials, including
“every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.”
A number of Missouri elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, have called on President Joe Biden to enforce the Comstock Act in regards to medication abortion. The Biden administration has refused.
A renewed push for enforcement is expected when Donald Trump takes office again later this month. Trump’s prior administration did not enforce the law.
“We’re pointing to the Comstock Act saying ‘here’s the law, you have to work within the confines of this law, and here is the enforcement mechanism,’” Vroman said.
Magdits asked who would enforce the Rolla ordinance.
“The citizens will enforce,” Vroman said, drawing several outbursts of laughter from the crowd followed by a call for decorum.
Dickson, in an interview with The Independent, said law enforcement could not apply the ordinance, nor could a woman who receives and takes the medication be found liable under this ordinance.
It would rely solely on citizens suing any person or organization who provides abortion medication.
For example, he said, if an organization mailed abortion medication to a Rolla teenager, her parents could then sue the entity that mailed the medication.
And if Planned Parenthood again began prescribing drugs for medication abortions, an individual could sue Planned Parenthood.
The FDA has approved two medications — mifepristone and misoprostol — for use in the first 10 weeks or pregnancy. The availability of both are under threat under the Comstock Act. Abortions performed after 10 weeks are done surgically.
In the six months after the Dobbs decision, the number of self-managed medication abortions rose by more than 26,000 across the U.S. according to a study published in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal. The medication is mailed everywhere in the U.S., including Missouri.
Vroman said the ordinance would only apply to elective abortions, not medically-necessary abortions.
The ACLU of Missouri disagrees, saying in a written statement that the ordinance would also leave hospitals and providers vulnerable to lawsuits, including when treating miscarriages, which are medically documented as abortions and are often treated using mifepristone or misoprostol, both of which can be used to induce labor or stop hemorrhaging after childbirth.
At one point during Monday night’s meeting, council members called upon Dr. Jenny Pennycook, an OB-GYN in Rolla, to explain her interpretation of the ordinance. She said she was trained at a Catholic Jesuit institution and has never been an abortion provider.
Asked by council members if she believed the ordinance could create hurdles for miscarriage care, Pennycook said yes.
Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022, Pennycook said she never had issues prescribing mifepristone or misoprostol.
Since then, Pennycook said she’s had numerous patients turned away from pharmacies, leaving her needing to call to clear up that the medication was not for abortion so her patient could access it.
“When pharmacists are scared about the Comstock Act and enforcement and whether or not they can dispense these medications, it makes it harder for patients to get these medications,” she said. “Untreated missed miscarriages can result in hemorrhage or infection and women can lose their uterus and never get pregnant again or even die.”
Threat of ‘costly litigation’
In a town that touts itself as “the middle of everywhere,” residents are wary of what could turn their recent economic and population growth against them.
“We did not simply pick Rolla out of a hat,” Westbrook told the council after multiple members accused him and Dickson of targeting the town. “We were invited, specifically for the things that you guys are discussing today.”
Councilman Matt Fridley said while he opposes abortion, he doesn’t think it’s the responsibility of Rolla to resolve a state issue.
“I understand from a philosophical or a moral compass where you’re coming from for this, but I don’t believe the city should fight for this,” he said. “ … It creates negative press. It creates problems where individuals may go, ‘I don’t want to live in this community.’”
A few hours earlier, the council received a letter from the ACLU of Missouri that Magdits said he interpreted to mean: “this is a shot across the bow, and we’re watching what you’re doing.”
The letter, signed by Tori Schafer, an attorney who helped steer Amendment 3 to victory, threatened “costly litigation.”
“Rejecting this ordinance would demonstrate the city’s commitment to upholding the law and prioritizing the health and wellbeing of its community,” Schafer wrote. “Attempting to impose such a measure would invite expensive legal challenges, divert valuable city resources, and, most importantly, cause unnecessary harm and delay to individuals in need of critical health care.”
Some Texas towns have also expressed concerns over litigation costs when considering similar ordinances. In Rolla, Dickson proposed a workaround: a pro-bono attorney.
Dickson said former solicitor general of Texas Jonathan Mitchel has agreed to represent the city of Rolla pro-bono if they are sued. But that’s only if the city agreed, and it would not cover the cost of additional legal representation.
Much of the council’s confusion also centered around who could bring a lawsuit and where it would be litigated.
Nathan Nickolaus, the city attorney, said he believes the ordinance would allow a citizen to sue anyone who they believe helped get abortion medication to a person in Rolla.
“We’re saying you can’t do this in a state that says you can do this in a country that says you can’t do this,” Nickolaus said.
That suit would likely end up in municipal court, he said, “which is woefully inadequate a place to hear this kind of case. No offense to anyone in the city — I used to be a municipal prosecutor — municipal court is kind of the Mcdonalds of the judicial system. It’s light kind of stuff.”
Magdits on multiple occasions said the issue wasn’t whether or not the council opposes abortion. It was about legal repercussions.
When he was called to the podium for public comments at the end of the meeting, Dickson said the issue at hand absolutely was abortion.
“This really is a pro-life issue,” he said. “ … Are we going to stand with the attorney general of Missouri, or are we going to stand with the ACLU?”
Magdits asked if the ordinance specified what kind of medication use would be subject to litigation.
“It’s about abortion-causing drugs that cause abortion,” Westbrook said.
“That’s a slick answer,” Magdits said, before concluding: “Go fight this somewhere else.”
An icy greeting
Dickson has spent much of the past few years of his life driving across the south pitching Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn to receptive audiences. But on Monday, as he ventured a bit further north, he received an icy response.
It took him more than an hour to scrape the ice off his car. Then, he was greeted by a barrage of Rolla citizens who addressed him as a “carpetbagger.”
Despite an ice and winter storm passing through the town less than 24 hours earlier, the meeting happened as planned. Some residents during public comments took note of the small crowd, blaming the council for holding the meeting on the same day the public school district called off classes.
Planned Parenthood Great Rivers Action called on citizens to show up wearing pink to protest the ordinance.
“These bills intimidate abortion seekers and their loved ones, and waste taxpayers’ time and money just to score political points,” the release said.
Rolla resident Britt Giger said she was used to the council’s “embarrassing, crazy, chaotic” meetings, but said Monday’s events could cause national embarrassment.
“I don’t want to scroll TikTok and see this meeting,” she said, adding: “Imagine how university growth could be impacted if women don’t want to come here anymore.”
She was followed by Jenny Cunningham who held her husband’s hand as she explained that they moved to Rolla about a year ago in the hopes of starting a family. When Amendment 3 passed, they breathed a sigh of relief. But news of this ordinance puts women back in the “crosshairs,” she said.
“This is a bounty hunter law,” Cunningham said. “This turns citizen against citizen during the most terrible and tragic times that people can face in their lives.”
Joe Dalton, founder and CEO of Pregnancy Resource Center of Rolla, testified in support of the ordinance, emphasizing that Rolla citizens have access to abortion medication by mail despite the local Planned Parenthood currently being unable to prescribe it.
He was followed by a registered nurse who works in Rolla in a labor and delivery unit who also supported the ordinance.
“This would save the lives of countless children,” she implored the council.
Pamela Timson, a resident of Rolla for more than 40 years, urged the council to set the ordinance aside for good, sharing her own story of a medical condition that made childbirth dangerous.
She found it outrageous that Rolla would attempt to qualify a constitutional amendment so soon out of the gates.
“We haven’t even given our state government a chance to qualify it yet,” she said.
Vote stalled for now
The council ultimately decided not to officially put the ordinance on the agenda for its next meeting. But Vroman still has the opportunity to bring his revised ordinance before the council during council comments later this month.
Vroman brought the initial ordinance forward in November before recruiting Westbrook and Dickson to help him write a revised draft.
At a Dec. 16 council meeting, Dominic Barceleau of the Missouri Attorney General’s office testified that state law does not prohibit Rolla from enacting such an ordinance.
“It’s the intent of the legislature to regulate abortion to the fullest extent of the law,” Barceleau said. “The attorney general’s position is that doesn’t prevent concurrent municipal regulation that’s also consistent with the legislature’s intent to regulate abortion.”
Dickson, who also drove up from Texas for that meeting, told council members the target of the ordinance was not just Planned Parenthood, but also pharmacies.
“So when cities do this, it really is doing as much as we possibly can to push back, to align ourselves with the attorney general’s office and to put tools in our tool belts to prevent this from getting out of hand, because what the Biden administration has done in a multitude of different categories is create mass chaos,” he said before devolving into a short rant about the border wall.
The mayor remained skeptical from the start.
“It’s not clear to me why Rolla needs to carry this banner when the problem, whether it’s the attorney general, the governor or whoever the hell else is up there, they need to sort this out,” Magdits said last month. “I don’t think it’s Rolla, Missouri’s responsibility to lead this charge.”
His opinion seemed to change little on Monday.
In fact, Dickson said after the meeting, Magdits “threatened to cut my nuts off” after he accused Magdits of siding with Planned Parenthood, even though Magdits during the meeting expressed frustration that Amendment 3 even made it on the ballot.
The Independent could not immediately reach the mayor for comment, but Rolla City Administrator John Butz confirmed he overheard part of the conversation.
“I was there and I heard it,” Butz said. “I think in the context the mayor wasn’t threatening him per se with that, I think it was in the side conversation the two of them were having. So I’ll leave it up to them to comment on the intent or the context of what was said.”
The next meeting is scheduled for Jan. 21. Dickson said he’s not yet decided if he will be there. But he’s also not giving up.
“When properly educated, the majority of council, I think, is going to want to pass this ordinance,” Dickson said. “… We’re going to keep on keeping on.”