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A decades-old U.S. government policy reinstated by President Donald Trump in 2017 that restricts international aid to NGOs that support abortion is linked to a 40% rise in abortions in some parts of sub-Saharan African, a study showed on Thursday. The "Mexico City Policy", also known as the "global gag rule", also led to more pregnancies and lower contraceptive use among women in African countries reliant on U.S. foreign aid, the study in the Lancet Global Health journal showed. (Kelland, 6/27)

Of course, abortion rates could have changed during those two decades for reasons wholly unrelated to U.S. funding policy. But in an effort to factor out that possibility, the researchers divided the 26 countries into two groups: In the first were countries that received the highest amount per person of U.S. family planning aid. In the second group were the countries that received the lowest amount. The idea is that countries receiving a large amount of aid per person would likely be more vulnerable to changes in the policies governing U.S. aid. So by comparing what happened to the abortion rates in those more aid-dependent countries with the abortion rates of countries that were otherwise similar but less dependent on U.S. money for family planning, the researchers believed they could better isolate the impact of the funding ban on abortion rates. (Aizenman, 6/27)

American women faced with new restrictions on abortions passed by a dozen U.S. states this year are turning to abortion pills from foreign online suppliers, and the states say there is little they can do to stop it. In the year before many of these new restrictions passed Republican-controlled state legislatures, over 20,000 U.S. women sought the pills online from providers willing to defy U.S. federal rules over sale of the drugs that induce miscarriage. (6/27)

The battle to keep open Missouri's only abortion clinic has moved from the courts to a state administrative process, adding to the confusion about the future of the Planned Parenthood-operated clinic in St. Louis. No state has been without a functioning abortion clinic since 1974, the year after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized the procedure nationwide. (6/27)

A federal judge has ordered the state to expedite its review of a license Planned Parenthood is seeking to provide abortions at its Louisville clinic and report back to him no later than Aug.19 with a decision. The ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers follows a long-running battle between the administration of Gov. Matt Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican, and Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky over the license it has been seeking since 2015. (Yetter, 6/27)

With the fate of abortion access in question with a newly conservative majority Supreme Court, states are taking matters into their own hands, imposing virtual bans or severe restrictions on the procedure or by enshrining the right to abortion in state law. Supporter of the abortion bans hope they will force the Supreme Court's hand to revisit Roe v. Wade, perhaps undoing it. If the 1973 landmark case protecting a woman's right to an abortion until the fetus is viable were overturned, abortion would not automatically be illegal. Instead, it would allow states to set their own laws legalizing, banning or restricting the procedure at any time during pregnancy. (Milligan, 6/27)