�鶹Ů��

Planned Parenthood says it will work with its abortion-rights allies in eight states to repeal laws that may be vulnerable following the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down tough abortion restrictions in Texas. The repeal campaign, announced Thursday, will initially target laws in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as measures in Texas that were not directly addressed by the Supreme Court ruling. Laws in other states may be targeted later. (Crary, 6/30)

Monday’s 5-3 ruling struck down parts of a Texas law regulating abortion clinics, saying courts must independently examine abortion rules to determine if they offered health benefits to women that outweighed hurdles they might pose to access. Abortion-rights advocates believe the opinion is an opportunity to challenge hundreds of state laws passed since 2010 by antiabortion legislators. (Radnofsky, 6/30)

In addition to Texas, five other states have enacted laws with surgical center requirements, including Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Tennessee, where the law was temporarily blocked by a judge, according to the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights. The group noted nine other states had passed laws that require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals: Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin. But until this week, the laws had been blocked by the courts in all but Missouri, North Dakota and Tennessee. (Hennessy-Fiske, 6/30)

A federal judge on Thursday blocked an Indiana law that would have banned abortions based solely on a fetus’s disability or genetic anomaly, suggesting that it was an illegal limit on a woman’s long-established constitutional right. Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, of Federal District Court for Southern Indiana, also held up a state ban on abortions motivated solely by a fetus’s race or sex. In the preliminary injunction, Judge Pratt said limiting the reasons for an abortion was “inconsistent with the notion of a right rooted in privacy concerns and a liberty right to make independent decisions.” (Smith and Eckholm, 6/30)

A federal judge late Thursday put on hold key portions of a new Florida law that would block public funding for Planned Parenthood and greatly increase inspection requirements for abortion clinics. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle issued his ruling just hours before the law passed by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature was due to take effect. (Fineout, 7/1)

Planned Parenthood facilities in Missouri will continue to receive government funding for women's health services for a while, despite a new budget provision attempting to stop it. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon said Thursday that state officials will eventually implement the budget's ban on Medicaid money going to organizations that provide abortions. But the prohibition won't start when the budget takes effect Friday, as Republican lawmakers had intended. (Lieb, 6/30)

An abortion rights group is plastering Cleveland with billboards ahead of the Republican National Convention to taunt Donald Trump and the party over their opposition to abortion. The National Institute for Reproductive Health is putting up six billboards this week that picture women in a police lineup with the text, “When the RNC platform makes abortion illegal, how much time will we serve?” The line is a tie to Trump’s comment in March that women should be punished for getting an abortion. He later said that he was referring to punishment only if the procedure were made illegal — and that the physician, not the woman, should be punished. (Haberkorn, 6/30)

Abortions in Texas plummeted about 15 percent during the first year after approval of tough restrictions that the U.S. Supreme Court has since struck down — a decline that activists say shows how hard it had become to get an abortion in America's second-largest state. The health department released the statistics Thursday, after lengthy delays it blamed on finalizing the data. But providers and abortion-rights groups spent months complaining that officials were intentionally stalling, and the American Civil Liberties Union even recently accused the state of "concealing" the information. (Weissert, 7/1)

The number of abortions performed in Texas fell 14 percent in 2014, the first full year under House Bill 2, the law that implemented tougher regulations that forced abortion clinics to close across the state. The decline, amounting to almost 9,000 fewer abortions, was far greater than the 6.5 percent drop in abortions in 2013 and the 5.8 percent decrease in 2012. (Lindell, 6/30)

Kaiser Health News staff writer Julie Rovner reports: "The Supreme Court this week delivered its strongest affirmation of a women’s right to abortion in two and a half decades. By a margin of 5-3, it struck down two key provisions of a Texas law restricting the procedure. But where does the decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt fit into the court’s long history of outlining abortion rights and restrictions? And what impact might the case have on similar laws in other states and this fall’s elections? Here are five insights about the case that provide some context." (Rovner, 7/1)