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Months after pushing through an expansion of abortion access that drew huge protests at the State House, legislative Democrats are now setting their sights on enshrining a right to an abortion in the Maine Constitution. Senate Democrats announced Wednesday that the Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing later this month on a proposed constitutional amendment sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Eloise Vitelli, D-Arrowsic. (Billings, 1/10)

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat entering the final legislative session of his career but whose wife is trying to bring the family name to the U.S. Senate, used his annual State of the State address Tuesday to push back against attacks on abortion rights, champion the economic potential of artificial intelligence and hammer away at the state’s most stubborn issue, affordability. “We have seen a resurgent, radical, right-wing agenda that is hellbent on coming after our fundamental rights. Voting rights. LGBT rights. Reproductive rights, and explicitly, the right to an abortion,” Murphy said. “There is no sugarcoating it: Women’s health care in America is in a state of crisis.” (Rivard and Han, 1/9)

With just two weeks to go before the state’s presidential primary, a new poll of likely voters in New Hampshire suggests abortion will directly impact how they vote. Fifty-five percent of the 1,000 voters surveyed said their opposition to the Supreme Court overturning the federal right to an abortion is “the main” or “among” the factors motivating their vote, according to the poll by Suffolk University, The Boston Globe, and USA TODAY. (Villa de Petrzelka, 1/10)

Donald Trump, the former US president, boasted about the “miracle” of ending the constitutional right to abortion but warned that Republicans who tout extreme bans are being “decimated” in elections. Trump was put on the spot on Wednesday during a Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, his latest attempt at counter-programming a Republican debate that was being shown on CNN at the same time. (Smith, 1/10)

More than 56,000 abortions were performed in Illinois the year the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, marking the most pregnancy terminations statewide since the mid-1990s, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health’s annual abortion statistics report. The rise in abortions that year was driven by a roughly 49% spike in out-of-state patients: Nearly 17,000 people came from other states to Illinois to terminate a pregnancy in 2022 compared with roughly 11,000 abortion seekers who traveled from other states in 2021, the data showed. (Lourgos, 1/10)

When the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Texas physicians are not required to perform life-saving abortions, the judges used an unusual legal interpretation of a federal emergency care law, according to scholars. The court’s opinion, authored by former President Donald Trump-appointed Judge Kurt Engelhardt, said the federal law obligates doctors to treat both a fetus and the pregnant patient because the law includes the term “unborn child.” ... But that reading strays from the federal law’s original purpose, lawyers say. (Gill, 1/10)

To understand the problems with Florida’s oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers, you don’t have to look much further than Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, north of Miami. The crisis pregnancy center in Broward County steered women away from abortion while providing free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and parenting classes. (Morel and Daly, 1/10)

At least 1,309 pharmacists in 91 counties across North Carolina have trained over the past two years to prescribe hormonal contraception to consumers who walk into their pharmacies. They also are confirmed as providers with the state’s Board of Pharmacy. (Crumpler, 1/11)