It was always inevitable, and now it’s official: The new era of relentless political intrusion into personal medical decisions is killing women.

A state medical review board in Georgia has concluded that the state’s extreme abortion ban contributed to the deaths of at least two women there in late 2022, shortly after the ban was imposed. Given the relatively small sample of reviewed cases that revealed the two tragedies, it’s a mathematical certainty that there are many more today. And not just in Georgia.

And how is the political party that has created this deadly threat responding, here in Missouri and elsewhere? By doubling down on its efforts to not only deny women their right to decide what happens in their own bodies, but to deny voters at large the right to weigh in on the issue at all.

Those voters aren’t helpless. Nov. 5 is around the corner.

As recently reported by ProPublica, the two Georgia cases both involved women who had taken abortion pills, the only viable option in the state for women determined to end unwanted pregnancies due to the new ban. Both encountered a rare event in which the fetal tissue failed to be entirely expelled, requiring what would normally be a routine medical intervention.

In one of the cases, the woman hesitated to go to the hospital because, as she told her family, she knew the state prohibited virtually any abortion procedure. She died at home.

The other woman went into the hospital but was made to wait some 20 hours before doctors finally operated — a crucial delay apparently driven by fear of inadvertently violating the state’s abortion ban. By then, it was too late for her.

Those who try to parse the details for fuel to blame the women themselves — They shouldn’t have taken the medication! They should have sought emergency care sooner!— miss the point by miles: Women and doctors facing personal and complex reproductive medical issues should be able to make their decisions based on medical factors, not based on the extremist fervor of a political minority determined to impose its ideology on others.

Polls consistently show strong majorities of Americans favor reasonable abortion rights as they existed under Roe. Of the seven states that have put the question to statewide votes since Roe fell, every single one has come down on the side of those rights, including red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.

Here in Missouri, the Republicans who have a stranglehold on the state’s political system are well aware of that dynamic. Which is why they embarked on one shameless legal stunt after another to try to prevent Missourians from being allowed to vote this fall on Amendment 3, which would restore reproductive rights to their state.

Among the more recent attempts was from a group of anti-choice activists that included two state legislators, who launched a last-ditch effort to get the question pulled from the ballot on a technicality. The Missouri Supreme Court this month ruled against them. That means the state’s voters will be allowed at last to decide whether the lives of Missouri women will continue to be put in jeopardy by an abortion ban even more extreme than the one in Georgia.

Meanwhile, other GOP efforts to mislead Missouri voters continue. Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is fighting in court to post in polling places a blatantly false and inflammatory description of what the amendment would do. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley this month falsely told an audience that the measure would “mandate constitutionally … transgender treatments for minors.” It does nothing of the sort.

Such is the state of the post-Roe abortion landscape: Republicans are lying while women are dying.

Missouri’s voters — and those in a slew of other states considering abortion-rights ballot measures Nov. 5 — have the power to reject the lies and protect the women.

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