The owners of the NFL football team from Kansas City, Missouri, have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to an anti-abortion political action committee that has run misleading advertisements about an abortion ballot initiative set to be voted on in November.
Unity Hunt is the business entity that controls the estate of Lamar Hunt, the founder of the NFL team that was first known as the Dallas Texans and later moved to Kansas City in the 1960s, where it took on the racist moniker of “the Chiefs.” The business donated $300,000 in September to Leadership for America PAC, which is currently running radio advertisements opposed to Missouri’s ballot initiative.
The contribution from Unity Hunt makes the business one of the biggest contributors to that PAC.
The ads from Leadership for America PAC deride the ballot measure as being a “cleverly-worded” ploy to convince voters that the abortion measure is limited in scope to only allowing the procedure up to fetal viability, deceptively suggesting that it actually contains “loopholes that allow for abortions through all nine months of pregnancy.”
“Abortion proponents…want abortion [to be] as common as the morning after pill,” the ad purports.
In truth, the measure’s proponents have been forthcoming about what the measure would entail.
The amendment would establish an unlimited right to abortion up to fetal viability — generally regarded as between 22-25 weeks of pregnancy — and would allow the state to regulate the procedure after that point. A person could still obtain an abortion after that period, however, if their health was threatened due to their pregnancy.
Some abortion rights opponents — including GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump — have wrongly stated that abortion measures like Missouri’s proposal would lead to selective abortions up to nine months of pregnancy. Trump and his anti-abortion allies have also falsely claimed that such provisions allow post-birth infanticide, which is illegal in every state, and which no abortion rights measure being considered or currently implemented would allow.
The Missouri measure would undo the state’s current abortion ban, which forbids the procedure except to save the life of a pregnant person (a standard that, in practice, is oftentimes not allowed, as doctors fear being prosecuted by the state due to the ambiguous language of such exceptions).
Leadership for America PAC has so far spent just over $32,000 on the radio ads, but the contribution from Unity Hunt means they can do much more political spending in the coming weeks. The PAC has also moved some of its funds to other groups opposing the abortion rights measure, including donating $100,000 to the main opposition group in Missouri called Vote “No” on 3, and another $100,000 to Missouri Leadership Fund, which gave $100,000 six days later to Vote “No” on 3 as well.
Spending from groups in favor of passing the abortion rights measure has far outpaced spending from those that are against it, however. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, for example, the lead organization in favor of passing the amendment proposal, spent more than $7.3 million through June, and purchased $8.7 million in television advertisements at the start of September.
Polling in the state shows that a majority of residents support the measure. In a St. Louis University/YouGov poll published in late August, 52 percent of respondents said they favored the amendment’s passage, while only 34 percent said they were opposed.
Abortion rights will be on the minds of millions of voters this fall. In total, there are 11 statewide ballot measures relating to abortion across 10 different states up for consideration. With the exception of Nebraska, which has two competing measures (one seeking to expand abortion rights, the other to curtail them), all of the proposals would protect or expand access to the procedure within their boundaries.