Missouri's Parental Rights Bills: Treating Children as Property
The Show-Me State's bills strip minors of the right to consent to their own personal care, and handing parents a private cause of action against the government when it acts to protect children.
Jamie Martin is a Missouri parent of three teenagers. She would want to know.
If one of her children had a sexually transmitted infection, she would want to know. If one was struggling with substance abuse, she would want to know. She said so herself, in testimony submitted to the Missouri House Children and Families Committee in February of this year.
She still urged the committee to vote NO on Missouri’s new parental rights bills moving in the legislature.
What Jamie Martin understands is something that the bill’s sponsors — and the national organizations that flew in from Washington and Georgia to support it — do not seem concerned about: that stripping teenagers of the right to seek confidential medical care does not make parents more informed.
Tragically, it makes sick teenagers go untreated and without needed medical care. It makes young people struggling with addiction delay getting help. It makes teenagers who may be pregnant forego receiving reproductive health care services. It closes the door precisely at the moment a young person might first be reaching for the handle.
“Minors are less likely to receive treatment,” Martin wrote, “which is likely to increase rates of infection overall.”
That is a parent — not an advocate, not a lobbyist, not an ideological opponent of parental rights — reading the actual text of the bill and concluding that it would harm children.
The Missouri legislature should listen to her.
“When evaluating the extent of parents’ legal rights, we should not merely consider how ideal parents exercise their power to provide the effective care and guidance children need. The extent of what the law enables imperfect parents to do to their children must also be taken into account… Thinking only in terms of how the best parents conduct themselves is a mistake; it is also necessary to account for what the worst parents can get away with.”
— Samantha Godwin, Against Parental Rights, Columbia Human Rights Law Review
Missouri Sen. Rick Brattin and Rep. Ben Keathley have introduced companion legislation — SB 948 in the Senate and HB 2426 in the House — as the latest entry in a nationwide wave of so-called “parental rights” bills.
The House bill has already cleared the Children and Families Committee and continues to advance.
Like South Carolina’s H. 4757, which I wrote about recently, Missouri’s bills are wrapped in lofty language about parental liberty and “fundamental rights.” But when you read the actual text, what you find is legislation that is, in important respects, even more dangerous to children than what South Carolina passed.
The Missouri bills do three things:
They create a new constitutional-tier framework for parental rights (Section 1.340).
They enumerate an expansive list of parental rights over children’s education, health care, privacy, and school records (Section 1.341).
And then — this is where Missouri goes further than most — they strip minors of the right to consent to their own medical care for drug or substance abuse and sexually transmitted infections (STI), rights that Missouri law has protected for decades (amended Section 431.061).
Each of those components in the so-called “parental rights” bills is harmful. Together, they are a systematic rollback of the legal architecture that protects vulnerable young people.
What the Bills Actually Do
The Constitutional Frame
Section 1.340 declares that a parent has a “fundamental liberty and fundamental interest” in the care, custody, and control of their child — including the right to direct the child’s “upbringing, education, health care, and mental health free from government interference.”
This language is not symbolic. It is legally significant and sweeping. In judicial settings, labeling something a “fundamental right” triggers “strict scrutiny”1 — the highest standard of judicial review. Under the Missouri bills, any government action affecting parental authority must serve a compelling governmental interest and be “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest.
That is an extraordinarily demanding standard, and it applies to everything that follows: every school policy, every health care protocol, and every child protection investigation. The bills explicitly state they apply to all state and local laws and ordinances, whether adopted before or after August 28, 2026. That is not a minor detail. It means child-serving institutions throughout the state will face legal exposure for actions they take in children’s interests every single day.
The legal doctrine of parens patriae — the state’s long-standing authority to protect children from harm — is not eliminated by this language, but it is severely constrained. As for children’s independent rights and interests, they are neither mentioned nor seemingly addressed.
Supporters of these types of bills like to cite Parham v. J.R. — a 1979 Supreme Court case — as authority for the proposition that parental rights are fundamental and that assuming parents might harm their children is, in the Court’s words, “repugnant to American tradition.” But Parham is a more complicated friend than they acknowledge.
The same decision that cautioned against infringing on parental rights in making medical decisions for a child also recognized that “parents may at times be at odds with the child” and affirmed that the state retains independent authority to protect children’s interests — precisely because parental love, however genuine, does not guarantee judgment in the best interests of the child. The Court in Parham also upheld procedural safeguards for children regarding parental medical decisions.
Justice Brennan, in a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, was unequivocal on this point. He wrote:
Constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority. Minors, as well as adults, are protected by the Constitution, and possess constitutional rights.
Citing a line of Supreme Court decisions — among them Breed v. Jones, 421 U. S. 519 (1975); Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975); Tinker v. Des Moines School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969); In re Gault, 387 U. S. 1 (1967); and Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52, 428 U. S. 74 (1976) — Brennan added:
Indeed, it may well be argued that children are entitled to more protection than are adults. The consequences of an erroneous commitment decision are more tragic where children are involved.
Using Parham to justify stripping minors of the right to consent to STI testing or substance abuse treatment is not an extension of that ruling. It is a reversal of it.
The Enumerated Rights
Section 1.341 lists thirteen specific parental rights “exclusively reserved to a parent” without “obstruction by or interference” from any government entity or “other institution.” This list includes:
The right to access and review all of a child’s written and electronic educational records
The right to make and consent in writing to “all physical and mental health care decisions” for the child
The right to access and review all health and medical records of the child
The right to prior written consent before any biometric scan of the child, before any DNA record is created or stored, and before any government authority makes a video or voice recording of the child
The right to be notified “promptly” if any governmental authority suspects abuse, neglect, or a criminal offense has been committed against the child — with an exception only if notification is “likely to endanger the life or physical safety of the child”
These provisions violate the fundamental rights of adolescents in numerous ways.
The right to privacy and confidential care for adolescents facilitates access to health care services, but also includes the right to safety when a parent is the source of harm. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last year, a Texas physician shared that he witnessed parents, who are the very “abusers,” making medical decisions for “children who suffered unfathomable abuse such as intentional starvation, cigarette burns, finger amputations, etc.”
The “right to make and consent in writing to ‘all physical and mental health care decisions’ for the child,” in other states, has led to the denial of basic and necessary health care services, including band-aids by school nurses, delayed treatment for children with broken bones for hours, denied counseling to adolescents calling suicide hotlines, prevented children who have been raped from receiving care, and prevented pregnant teenagers the ability to receive prenatal care.
That last provision regarding parental notification of possible abuse also demands careful attention. The bill’s abuse notification requirement is written with an exception so narrow that it will be effectively useless in many of the cases that matter most. A government official must be able to say that notifying the parent is “likely to endanger” the child’s life or physical safety — not merely that it might harm the child, not that the parent is a suspect, not that disclosure would compromise an investigation, but that life or physical safety is specifically and likely at risk. That is a very high bar. Many abuse investigations begin precisely because we do not yet know what danger a child is in. The bills require notification at the very moment when the protective case for withholding it is strongest.
The bills also bar governmental authorities — with an exception for law enforcement — from withholding from a parent “information that is relevant to the physical, emotional, or mental health of the child.” This is mandatory disclosure writ large, applied across every government institution that works with children. School counselors. Social workers. Public health nurses.
A student who tells a school counselor they are experiencing family violence, that they are questioning their sexual orientation, or that they are pregnant and afraid to go home — that student’s confidence is not protected under these bills. The only exception that applies to them is if law enforcement is involved. By the time law enforcement is involved, the harm has often already occurred.
The Private Right of Action
Section 1.341 also grants parents who believe their rights have been violated the right to assert a claim in any judicial or administrative proceeding, and to obtain “declaratory relief, injunctive relief, compensatory damages, and reasonable attorney’s fees and costs” — including against the government. This is not a modest procedural right. This is a litigation engine.
Every school counselor who declines to report a student’s private disclosure. Every nurse or athletic trainer who provides medical care without prior parental consent. Every social worker who delays notification to complete an assessment. Any of them could now face personal liability or institutional legal action by a parent who believes their “fundamental rights” were obstructed. The chilling effect on child-serving professionals will be enormous, and children will be left uncared for and untreated.
This is one place where Missouri’s bills go further than South Carolina’s. South Carolina’s education provisions were also harmful, but they did not include a private cause of action of this scope. Missouri’s legislation does, even in cases in which professional judgment is in the best interests of children.
Where Missouri Goes Further: Stripping Minor Consent Rights
The stripping on the mature minor consent right is one of the most striking provisions in the bills, and the one that most clearly distinguishes them from South Carolina’s legislation — which was bad enough.
Missouri’s Section 431.061 currently allows a minor to consent to their own medical care for pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and drug or substance abuse. These provisions exist because decades of public health research and clinical experience have established that confidential access to care for these conditions is essential to getting young people into treatment. A teenager who fears that a visit to a clinic for STI testing will result in parental notification will simply not go. A young person struggling with substance abuse who knows their parents will be contacted may never seek help.
SB 948 and HB 2426 strike the venereal disease and substance abuse exceptions entirely. Under the amended law, a minor’s ability to consent to their own care is limited to pregnancy (excluding abortions). That is it.
This is not a marginal change. Missouri has a high rate of adolescent substance use. The rate of sexually transmitted infections among young people have climbed steadily in recent years. The existing consent statute was not an oversight — it was a considered response to the reality that adolescents who cannot seek confidential care do not seek care at all. These bills repeal that response.
It is worth pausing on what this means in practice. A seventeen-year-old who suspects they may have been exposed to an STI during a sexual encounter they are not ready to disclose to their parents will now have to either reveal that to a parent or go untreated. A sixteen-year-old experimenting with substances, not yet addicted but heading in a dangerous direction, who wants help — they will either have to tell their parents or go without treatment.
What Missourians Told Their Legislature
The witness record before the Missouri House Children and Families Committee on February 24, 2026, tells its own story.
Jamie Martin, the Missouri parent of three teenagers whose testimony opened this piece, urged the committee to vote no — not because she wouldn’t want to know if her child had a STI, but because she understood what the bill’s consent provisions would actually produce. Stripping minor consent protections, she wrote, would mean “minors are less likely to receive treatment, which is likely to increase rates of infection overall.” She raised the same concern about substance abuse: that removing confidential access to care would cause young people to delay or forgo treatment entirely, increasing harm “to our population generally.”
This is a parent making the child-safety argument. It should be heard.
Sarah Berry submitted detailed written testimony identifying the bills as “legally overbroad, structurally disruptive, and litigation-generating.” She independently identified the same structural problems analyzed above: that codifying strict scrutiny across all state and local action would generate automatic constitutional-tier litigation over school policies, public health measures, health care access for minors, mandatory reporting frameworks, and child welfare interventions.
Dava-Leigh Brush of the Missouri Equity Education Partnership raised a point that goes to the heart of the bill’s internal contradiction: that one parent’s exercise of sweeping parental rights can directly infringe on another parent’s ability to guide their own child. She also noted what educators across the country have found — that the compensatory damages provision would drive teachers and counselors out of the profession, as they would face personal financial liability for professional judgments made in children’s interests.
Emily Stoinski, a registered Missouri voter, put it plainly: a bill like this, she wrote, “is allowance for youth and children to be abused.” It is not uncommon, she noted, for abusive parents to prohibit access to medical care. The bill, she concluded, “This bill is not parent supportive, rather is is supporting abusive parents.”
Kortnie Huddleston and Michael Dreyer identified what is perhaps the bill’s most dangerous practical consequence: that by forcing schools to notify parents of any suspected harm against a student — with an exception so narrow it will rarely apply — the bill will compel the “outing of LGBTQ+ youth to unsupportive households, putting them at direct risk of abuse, homelessness, and suicide.”
Huddleston and Dreyer rightfully add:
This is not about empowering families; it is about codifying a dangerous ideology that prioritizes absolute parental control over a child’s right to safety, bodily autonomy, a teacher’s duty of care, and a well-resourced, inclusive public education.
These are parents, educators, and citizens who read the bill’s actual text — and concluded that it would leave children less safe, less likely to seek care, and more isolated from trusted adults at exactly the moment they need them most.
The committee advanced the bill anyway.
It is also worth noting what the committee did respond to. Homeschool advocacy groups — Families for Home Education and the Home School Legal Defense Association — initially registered as neutral and said they would move to support only if specific protections were added.
Although those changes were made for homeschooling parents, no parallel protection was added for the teenager who needs confidential STI care and cannot safely disclose it to a parent. No amendment was adopted to preserve the professional judgment of the school counselor trying to protect a student in a dangerous home. The children most at risk from this legislation were not at the table, and their best interests were ignored.
The “Worst Parent” Problem
Every time one of these bills is debated, its supporters gesture toward the devoted, attentive parent who simply wants to be involved in their child’s life. That parent exists, and nobody disputes that engaged parents matter enormously to children’s wellbeing.
But we do not write laws for the best-case parent. We must write laws that must hold up when the people subject to them include the worst-case actors. And the worst-case actors are not hypothetical.
Missouri has parents who abuse their children. It has parents who would use mandatory notification about a child’s STI as an occasion for violence, rejection, or both. It has parents who, if told their teenager sought substance abuse treatment, would remove them from care as punishment. It has parents whose child protection investigators have long understood that notifying them could endanger the children they are supposed to be protecting.
SB 948 and HB 2426 give those parents new weapons. They provide mandatory notification rights, expansive records access, and a private cause of action they can use to suppress professional judgment. And they strip the legal architecture that has allowed children to access care despite abusive parents.
This is the “organized abandonment” dynamic at work. First, we dismantle the scaffolding of support around vulnerable young people — the confidential school counselor, the healthcare provider who can treat an STI without triggering a crisis at home, the substance abuse clinician who can build trust without requiring a child to navigate parental opposition. Then, when children do not seek help, or when harm goes untreated, we express confusion about why the system failed them.
Policymakers love to proclaim that they care about the kids. In this case, Governor Kehoe’s words are terrific.
And yet, those same politicians, who say the right things, often fail children by creating systems specifically designed to make the support, care, safety, and help they need harder to access.
The Pattern Is National, the Harm Is Local
Missouri’s bills are not isolated legislation. They are part of a coordinated national campaign — pushed by the Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage Action, national organizations that have advanced nearly identical provisions in state after state. Idaho, Texas, Florida, South Carolina. The very same “parental rights” provisions move from state to state, sometimes tightened, sometimes made worse.
Idaho's 2024 "parental rights" law has caused such significant documented harm to children that the legislature is now actively debating whether to unwind it. A cleanup bill has cleared committee and awaits a full House vote — an extraordinary acknowledgment that the law failed the children it claimed to protect.
Whether Idaho’s bill ultimately passes, the harms that drove it to this point are not in dispute: minors blocked from accessing rape kits without parental consent, children with serious medical conditions left waiting for treatment until a parent could be reached, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline prevented from following up with adolescents in crisis.
Missouri’s bills were written after the Idaho results had been known. The Missouri sponsors, who are making the same exact arguments in favor of “parental rights,” should recognize the harm their own bill will undoubtedly cause children and adolescents. When much of the legislative language is “copy-and-paste,” so are the negative consequences.
The lessons from Idaho, Texas, and now South Carolina are consistent: when you write sweeping parental control over every aspect of a child’s health and school life, children get hurt. The kids who most need protection are the ones least protected.
What Missouri Should Do Instead
First and foremost, Missouri should learn from other states' mistakes and reject SB 948 and HB 2426.
And if Missouri’s version of the bill continues to move forward, the legislature should, at a minimum:
Restore the minor consent provisions for sexually transmitted infections and substance abuse that have been part of Missouri law for good reason. The public health case for these provisions is overwhelming. Their elimination will increase untreated infection and addiction among adolescents.
Remove the private right of action against the government. The litigation exposure created by this provision will chill professional conduct and compromise the child-serving mission of schools, health agencies, and social services.
Revise the abuse notification provision to include a meaningful exception that does not require a finding that life or physical safety is specifically at risk before notification can be withheld. The current exception is too narrow to protect children at the most dangerous moment.
Protect the confidential relationship between students and health professionals. Any mandatory disclosure provision must include an explicit safe harbor for situations where disclosure would place a child at risk.
Include children in the analysis. Ask and honestly answer: does this bill keep children safer? The text of SB 948 and HB 2426 does not.
Listen to the kids. If Idaho, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and other states had actually listened to the adolescents who would be negatively affected by these types of bills, undue harm to their health could have been prevented.
Missouri's legislature should not need to wait for the same documented harms that drove Idaho and Texas to begin unwinding their own laws. They have the evidence from other states now. They have warnings from their own constituents on the record. They have the responsibility to listen and protect Missouri’s children from harm before it occurs — not after.
What You Can Do
Contact your Missouri state legislators and urge them to reject SB 948 and HB 2426 or substantially amend them to protect children’s health, safety, and access to care.
Share this post to raise awareness about what Missouri’s bills and other state “parental rights” laws are actually doing to children.
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Kids can’t wait.
ENDNOTE
Quotes about strict scrutiny:
“Strict in theory, but fatal in fact.” — Professor Gerald Gunther (1972), describing the high likelihood that laws subjected to this standard will be invalidated.
“Strict scrutiny leaves few survivors.” — Justice David Souter, dissenting in Alameda Books, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles (2002).