enter link description here issouri officials backed by activist forced-birthers, and with the wholehearted support of Republican Gov. Mike Parsons, have been trying to shut down the state’s last abortion clinic by refusing to renew its license. Just how far they are willing to go was discovered on the second day of an administrative hearing in St. Louis Tuesday when Dr. Randall Williams, the director of the state health department, said he had created a spreadsheet tracking the menstrual periods of Planned Parenthood clients. He obtained their medical records as part of the state’s investigation of the clinic.

The specific purpose was to uncover problem abortions so that the clinic’s license renewal could be denied and the clinic shuttered. Williams said four instances of “failed abortions” had been found by this atrocious mucking around in clients’ most intimate matters. That’s four out of approximately 3,000 abortions the clinic performed in 2018. Even Williams admitted that the failure figure is within the national average. But it was nonetheless used by the department to inspect the clinic in March and recommend there be no renewal.

Kurt Erickson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Yamelsie Rodriguez of Planned Parenthood called Williams’ tracking “deeply disturbing,” saying, “Missouri politicians have gone too far. This is government overreach at its worst. This is outrageous and disgusting. Planned Parenthood will always do what’s best for patients and that will guide any decisions we make about how we continue fighting for abortion access.”

The Missouri House minority leader, Democrat Crystal Quade, has demanded that an investigation be launched to determine whether patient privacy was compromised or laws broken by the tracking. “State law requires the health department director to be ‘of recognized character and integrity,'” Quade said in a statement. “This unsettling behavior calls into question whether Dr. Williams meets that high standard.”

Missouri is one of six states that now have only one abortion clinic. Not so long ago, the Show Me State was like those five others, with several clinics performing abortions. But the forced-birthers have been hard at work over the past decade throwing up regulations targeted to make safe, legal abortions more difficult, more expensive, and more time-consuming, with a dose of humiliation and shame thrown in for good measure.

Some of those laws have been blocked by state or federal courts, but others have passed judicial muster or not been contested. Scores of clinics have closed as a consequence. And now, since the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review an appeals court ruling in the Louisiana case of June Medical Services v. Gee, we’re headed for what could be the biggest showdown on abortion since the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or even the 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.

Shocking as this tracking of women’s periods seems, it’s not the first time government officials have meddled in women’s private affairs in such a manner. Jennifer Wright at Harper’s Bazaar wrote in April:

We still don’t know where 1,488 migrant children are. The U.S. government lost them. They admit as much. Even though the court ordered a halt to the policy of family separation, 245 more children have been taken from their parents. So they can’t figure out where children separated from their parents are, but by God, they can keep track of teenage migrant girls' menstrual cycles.

There are 28 pages detailing the periods, pregnancies and reason for the pregnancy (whether by rape or not) of teen girls in custody, some of whom are as young as 12. There may well be reasons for the government to track whether or not a woman is pregnant, and how far along in her pregnancy she is, but there’s no reason to track the cause of her pregnancy. It’s pretty fair to assume that they’re not doing this because they want to ensure women know all the options regarding their pregnancy. It’s almost certainly an attempt to bar them from getting abortions.

And that, of course, is exactly what Dr. Williams and the other forced-birthers have in mind in Missouri. If it was up to these misogynist authoritarians, they’d require girls in middle and high schools to document their periods, with intrusive random inspections to make sure nobody was lying.

Clinics performing abortions should meet reasonable health standards, and the vast majority do. But reasonable has obviously never been the objective. As has been obvious since the anti-abortion forces got rolling five minutes after Roe was decided, they are determined to control women’s sexuality. Menstrual tracking is the latest atrocious proof.