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Tennessee’s GOP-dominant Statehouse on Tuesday took a first step toward loosening one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, advancing a narrow exemption bill over threats from anti-abortion advocates that doing so would come with political retribution. Tennessee currently has no explicit exemptions in its abortion ban. Instead the law includes an “affirmative defense” for doctors, meaning that the burden is on the physician to prove that an abortion was medically necessary, instead of requiring the state to prove the opposite. (Kruesi, 2/15)

Proposed by Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield, and sponsored by the same senator who put forward the 2020 trigger law that is currently on hold, the proposal — titled “Abortion Changes” — would stop licensing abortion clinics in May, and would ban the operation of all abortion clinics starting in January 2024. (Anderson Stern, 2/14)

A bill that would have allowed pregnant women to drive in the HOV lane, further codifying in Utah law personhood status for unborn fetuses, failed in a Senate committee meeting Monday. (Anderson Stern, 2/14)

The administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) helped defeat a bill this week to put menstrual data stored on period-tracking apps beyond the reach of law enforcement, blocking what supporters pitched as a basic privacy measure. Millions of women use mobile apps to track their cycles, a practice that has occasionally raised data-security worries because the apps are not bound by HIPAA, the federal health privacy law. (Vozzella and Schneider, 2/14)

Protect Choice Ohio and Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom plan to file language for their amendment with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost's office by Feb. 28. Yost would have 10 days to determine whether the language constitutes "fair and truthful representation" of the proposed amendment and submit it to the Ohio Ballot Board. If the language is approved, 413,446 signatures from registered voters — 10% of the voter turnout in the 2022 gubernatorial election — would have to be collected by July 5 for the amendment to make the November ballot. (Smith, 2/15)

A few months after South Dakota banned abortion last year, April Matson drove more than nine hours to take a friend to a Colorado clinic to get the procedure. The trip brought back difficult memories of Matson’s own abortion at the same clinic in 2016. The former grocery store worker and parent of two couldn’t afford a hotel and slept in a tent near a horse pasture — bleeding and in pain. Getting an abortion has long been extremely difficult for Native Americans like Matson. It has become even tougher since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (Ungar and Hollingsworth, 2/14)