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Abortion providers in Texas withdrew their request that the Supreme Court step in to stop the state’s effort to restrict the procedure during the coronavirus pandemic, but new legal battles began Tuesday in Louisiana and Tennessee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Monday night gave abortion rights groups the half-measure they had sought at the high court. It exempted from Texas’s ban on nonessential medical procedures those seeking an abortion induced by medication in the early weeks of pregnancy, and those about to reach Texas’s prohibition of abortion after 22 weeks. (Barnes, 4/14)

Right after she was laid off from her medical job because of the coronavirus outbreak, a single mother of two in north Texas found out she was pregnant. The next day, when she called to make an appointment at a local abortion clinic, staff told her it had closed — and no other clinic in the state could provide her an abortion, either. “They told me the governor had put a halt on it,” said the woman, who asked to be identified by her first name, Kris, after driving 350 miles north to a clinic in Wichita, Kan., this week, crying and trembling with anxiety. (Hennessy-Fiske, 4/16)