Â鶹ŮÓÅ

While abortion rights advocates look ahead to the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump with trepidation, obstacles to women seeking to end unwanted pregnancies already are gathering intensity, research showed on Thursday. Fifty new abortion restrictions were passed last year in 18 of the 50 U.S. states, where legislators introduced more than 400 measures aimed at limiting abortion access, according to The Century Foundation, a U.S.-based public policy research group. The study found that 32 states tried to ban all or some abortions. (Wulfhorst, 1/19)

Mirroring a trend observed in most states around the country, the abortion rate in Louisiana declined by around 18 percent between 2011 and 2014, a new survey finds. The report, released this week by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, counted 12,210 abortions in the state in 2011. By 2014, the total had dropped to 10,150, a slight increase from the 9,890 reported in 2013. (Lipinski, 1/19)

From her desk in Roanoke, Va., Patrice Campbell books appointments for the 15 Planned Parenthood clinics across the region. Right after the election, she noticed a huge increase in calls, many of them asking for the same thing. "We've seen where a lot of patients — I would say maybe 50 to 70 percent of patients — [are] eager to get in for long-term contraceptives," Campbell says. "So their focus is, I need to get an IUD before Jan. 20 because an IUD can last for five, even 10 years." Jan. 20, of course, is Inauguration Day. (Shapiro, 1/19)

The number of abortions performed throughout Texas dropped after a 2013 law forced the closure of clinics in all but the largest cities, and the decline was steeper the farther a woman lived from one of the remaining clinics, a study found. (Weber, 1/19)

A wave of abortion clinic closures in Texas since 2013 has led to a drop in the number of abortions performed, and the steepest declines are associated with communities that were the farthest from the remaining clinics, according to a study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down the state's most stringent abortion restrictions proposed by House Bill 2, which then-Gov. Rick Perry signed into law in 2013 and required all Texas facilities performing abortions to meet hospital-like ambulatory surgical center standards and forced doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinics. (Alfaro, 1/19)

A U.S. judge issued a temporary restraining on Thursday halting Texas' plan to cut Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood to give him more time to consider thousands of pages of documents filed in the politically charged case, court records showed. (Herskovitz, 1/19)