The Cole County Courthouse in Jefferson City (Tessa Weinberg/Missouri Independent).

The Republican plan to ban most abortions in Missouri can go before voters next year but the ballot title must plainly say its intent, a Cole County judge ruled Friday.

The decision from Circuit Judge Daniel Green concluded that lawmakers properly combined bans on gender-affirming treatments for minors with reproductive rights in the proposed constitutional amendment but misled voters with the ballot language.

Quoting a Western District Court of Appeals ruling from 2020, Green wrote that “it was insufficient and unfair for a summary statement to fail to ‘alert voters to that change in some fashion.’”

And the ballot language, he wrote, fails to alert voters that it would repeal the reproductive rights

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