The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had asked the nation’s highest court to allow it to require women to pick up abortion drugs from a doctor’s office, hospital, or abortion facility rather than get them via the mail during the pandemic. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to grant the request.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Supreme Court precedent didn’t allow it to lift a restraining order against two pro-life laws. Arkansas had passed bills to protect unborn babies from abortion after 18 weeks of gestation or based on a Down syndrome diagnosis. The ruling from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a 2019 decision from U.S. District Court Judge Kristine Baker.

María Inés Franck avoided wearing blue for most of December. The president of the Latin Foundation for Culture in Argentina sometimes passed green-clad pro-abortion demonstrators on the streets of Buenos Aires, and she feared the color of the country’s pro-life movement would unnecessarily provoke them. But she wore blue the night of Dec. 29. Franck, her colleagues, and other pro-life friends stayed in the square outside the congressional building to hear the results of the Senate vote on the bill to legalize abortion.

During Noemi Padilla’s four years as an employee of Tampa Women’s Health Center in Florida, the staff checked online reviews of the facility weekly. “Under normal circumstances, if we got a bad review regarding an abortion, we would get yelled at,” Padilla remembers. But for one negative review written in November 2016, “I got kudos,” she said.

Abortion is set to become a codified right in Massachusetts after the state Legislature overrode Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto on a pro-abortion budget amendment this week. The House voted 107-46 on Monday to push through the legislation despite the governor’s objections, and the Senate agreed the next day with a vote of 32-8.

Despite the growing death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, abortion and euthanasia advocates continued to advance pro-death agendas in 2020: demanding special treatment for abortion facilities, advancing use of the abortion pill, and pushing for expansion of “assisted dying” laws. Meanwhile, pregnancy centers found ways to continue serving women in need. Pro-lifers saw some silver linings in the Supreme Court despite a disappointing summer ruling and raised alarm bells about COVID-19 vaccines’ distant connections to the abortion industry. Here’s the top news of 2020 on the life beat.

Laws that would safeguard the unborn from being dismembered in the womb or aborted because of their sex cannot take effect as planned, a federal judge ruled this week. The Arkansas legislature passed the laws in 2017, and they took effect just hours before U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker issued a two-week injunction against their enforcement on Tuesday.