This week, the Supreme Court upheld constitutional protections for abortion rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down one of the nation's toughest restrictions on abortion.

Women's groups said that Texas law would have forced more than three-quarters of the state's clinics to shut down.

Texas passed this restrictive law back in 2013, and it would have required abortion clinics to act more like hospital surgical centers.

So they would have had to spend hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars

to upgrade their facilities.

Here's what the opinion said.

It was written by Justice Breyer.

Both the admitting privileges and the surgical center requirements place a substantial obstacle

in the path of women

seeking a pre-viability abortion constitute an undue burden on abortion access and thus

To mark the occasion we have a story about the history of abortion in the U.S. that first aired last winter

when the spread of Zika and the resulting deformities and newborns was causing panic across South and Central America.

Abortion is illegal in those traditionally Catholic countries,

but so many women were giving birth to babies with microcephaly and the brain damage associated with it

that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights urged a widespread repeal of abortion bans.

You may be surprised to know this wasn't the first time an epidemic influenced the abortion debate.

Leslie Regan, Professor of History, Medicine, Gender, and Women's Studies, and law at the University of Illinois, says it happened

in the U.S. 50 years ago. But not right away. First, we all had to learn about the real threat

posed by the omnipresent seemingly harmless illness known as Rubella, or German measles.

In 1941, it was an Australian physician with mothers who figured

out that it caused cataracts, and then they kept investigating and saw heart defects, deafness,

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