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Competing measures that would expand or restrict abortion rights can appear on the ballot in Nebraska this fall, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday. One initiative would enshrine in the Nebraska Constitution the right to have an abortion until viability or later to protect the health of the pregnant woman. The other would write into the constitution Nebraska's current 12-week abortion ban, passed by the Legislature in 2023. The ban includes exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the pregnant woman. (9/13)

Arizona’s Civil War-era ban on nearly all abortions officially was repealed Saturday. The Western swing state has been whipsawed over recent months, starting with the Arizona Supreme Court deciding in April to let the state enforce the long-dormant 1864 law that criminalized all abortions except when a woman’s life was jeopardized. Then state lawmakers voted on a bill to repeal that law once and for all. (Govindarao, 9/14)

Physicians from around Florida gathered Wednesday in downtown Orlando to denounce a November ballot measure that seeks to amend abortion protections in the state constitution. It was the first public appearance of the group Physicians Against Amendment 4, an organization of over 300 Florida doctors of differing specialties. (Pedersen, 9/13)

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance on Sunday dodged answering whether former President Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban if he were president. “I think that I’ve learned my lesson on speaking for the president before he and I have actually talked about an issue,” Vance said on NBC. Trump’s “been incredibly clear that he doesn’t support a national abortion ban,” Vance said in an interview with Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “He wants abortion policy to be made by the states, because he thinks, look, Alabama is going to make a different decision from California, and that’s OK. We’re a big country. We can disagree.” (McCarthy, 9/15)

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison. (Surana, 9/16)

A place this size, especially one in a historically red state, was unlikely to have an abortion clinic before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. (Hollingsworth and Hanna, 9/15)

More than 5 percent of women who get their tubes tied later become pregnant, a new analysis suggests — and researchers say the failure of tubal sterilization procedures, which are widely considered permanent, “may be considerably more common than many expect.” The study, published in NEJM Evidence, used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which looks at contraception use, pregnancy and birth outcomes among a representative sample of U.S. women aged 15 to 44. The data was assembled during four waves of data collection from about 4,000 women who had tubal ligations between 2002 and 2015. (Blakemore, 9/15)

Patients are increasingly joining online communities to learn how to make pirated versions of abortion pills, GLP-1s and other prescription drugs and medical treatments. It's an outgrowth of frustration with high prices and bottlenecks in the health system, combined with a broader medical freedom movement built around patient empowerment and fueled by social media. (Reed, 9/16)