Over the dissents of four Justices, the Supreme Court on Thursday night temporarily barred the state of Louisiana from enforcing a law that has the potential for making abortion unavailable to many and perhaps most women in the state.

A divided Supreme Court on Monday turned down an attempt by two states to deny efforts to fund Planned Parenthood.

After Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced he was retiring from the Supreme Court, the politicians, the pundits and news reporters quickly settled on what they think will be the key issue when a predicted fight unfolds in the Senate over his successor: Roe v. Wade.

Overtaken by changing developments in lower courts, the Supreme Court acted narrowly on Monday to end one of the challenges to the Trump Administration policy of refusing to allow abortions for undocumented teenagers being held in official detention centers after entering the country illegally. 

A new lawsuit in defense of women’s right to an abortion landed in a state trial court in Iowa this week, and everyone involved already has a good idea of how it will come out in Iowa’s courts. But what counts more is what happens to the case if it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court plans to take up at its first private conference in the new year the intense, ongoing fight over an unsettled constitutional question – do undocumented immigrant teenagers who are pregnant have a right to an abortion? That question remains open even though three of those young women have had abortions or are now free to have the procedure.

It was a very interesting year.

Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center and Earl Maltz of Rutgers University discuss how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump approach abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and more.

Lyle Denniston, Constitution Daily’s Supreme Court correspondent, looks at an argument supported by Rand Paul in a proposed Senate bill that seeks to use the 14th Amendment as a way to end abortion without enacting a constitutional amendment.

Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Center’s constitutional literacy adviser, explains how the campaign to restrict abortion has been largely frustrated – for now – by Monday’s Supreme Court decision.