By Nazo Demirdjian

On December 13, 2023, the United States Supreme Court announced it will consider the future of Mifepristone­­–a pill used for medical abortions. The Supreme Court will decide whether the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2016 and 2021 approvals were proper or erroneous. The 2016 and 2021 FDA approvals concerned, respectively, the timeline of prescribing the pill and allowing prescriptions of the pill without a supervising physician to administer the drug. Only two years after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it will once again insert itself into the reproductive lives of Americans.

The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, issued on June 24, 2022, upended five decades of the right to abortion overnight, triggering a flurry of policy changes at both the state and federal levels. In 13 states, the Dobbs decision meant a near-immediate end to most legal abortions—these states all had previously enacted “trigger bans,” written to go into effect immediately upon Roe v. Wade’s overturning. Amid this drastic shift in abortion policy, President Biden issued an Executive Order aimed at safeguarding access to reproductive health services. The Executive Order mobilized several federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to report and act on different ways that reproductive care could be protected.

By Rebecca Collins

If you feel like the summers are getting hotter, they are. The world is warming, and hotter weather not only impacts the environment but also impacts our health. Some neighborhoods feel the effects of our warming world more than others. Average temperatures in the lower forty-eight states have been rising slowly since 1901, at an average rate of 0.17 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. However, since the 1970s this rate has increased significantly to between 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.55 degrees Fahrenheit per decade in the United States (“U.S.”). The global average rate of warming remains at 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that parts of the U.S. have warmed faster than the global average rate.