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In nearly every state that has banned abortion, the number of women receiving abortions increased between 2020 and the end of 2023, according to the most comprehensive account of all abortions by state since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the 13 states that enacted near-total abortion bans, the number of women receiving abortions increased in all but three, according to the study. Some women traveled to clinics in states where abortions were legal. Others ordered abortion pills from U.S. doctors online, after doctors in other states started writing prescriptions under shield laws that protect them when they provide mail-order pills to patients in states with bans. (Miller and Sanger-Katz, 10/22)

Missouri’s attorney general has renewed a push to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone, arguing in a lawsuit filed this month that its availability hurt the state by decreasing teenage pregnancy. The revised lawsuit was filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, alongside GOP attorneys general in Kansas and Idaho. It asks a judge in Texas to order the Federal Drug Administration to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone, one of two medications prescribed to induce chemical abortions. (Spoerre, 10/22)

Nicole was driving when she heard on the radio that Roe v. Wade had fallen, and that soon abortion would be almost completely illegal in her home state of Missouri. She thought first of her children, two teenagers who she feared might someday need reproductive health care, including abortion. She worried far less about herself. She was in her late 30s, and she was done having children. She had an intrauterine device, one of the most effective forms of birth control. The odds of an abortion ban affecting her directly seemed slim. Then six weeks later, Nicole took a pregnancy test. It came back positive. (Luthra, 10/22)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Marylanders To Vote On Expansive ‘Right To Reproductive Freedom’

Voters in 10 states will consider whether or not to protect or expand abortion rights in November. That includes battleground states such as Arizona and Nevada and such Republican strongholds as South Dakota and Missouri. In Maryland, where abortion is legal, a proposed amendment is much broader than many abortion-related ballot questions in other states. Called the Right to Reproductive Freedom amendment, it would enshrine in the state constitution a right “to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy.” (Varney, 10/23)

In Napa, Planned Parenthood has not been able to shake its old neighbor. Anti-abortion activists moved out of the building they had renovated only a few years before and have taken up residence in an office directly below the new Planned Parenthood clinic. (Ramos, 10/22)

The emergency contraceptive pill Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy following unprotected sex, has been available over the counter at most American pharmacies for more than a decade. But in more than 100 federally funded clinics and pharmacies run by or on behalf of Native American tribal nations, the medication is harder to access — if it’s available at all. (Herrera, Besst, Keenan-Kurgan and Martin, 10/22)

In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger law that would almost completely ban abortion if the justices ruled in favor of Dobbs. (Brown, 10/22)