What happened
The Georgia Supreme Court voted 6-1 yesterday to reinstate a restrictive abortion law, a week after a lower court judge struck down the 2019 law as a violation of the state constitution's privacy provisions. The six-week ban, passed in 2019 and in force since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, will stay in effect as state Attorney General Chris Carr (R) appeals. 

Who said what
Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney's Sept. 30 ruling gave "women in the state and across the South a short window" to obtain an abortion up to 22 weeks, The New York Times said. "Many women do not even realize they are pregnant at six weeks." 

In his partial dissent, Justice John Ellington said Carr's office had failed to "show any reason for urgency" and the law should have remained on hold during the appeal. "Fundamentally, the state should not be in the business of enforcing laws that have been determined to violate fundamental rights guaranteed to millions of individuals under the Georgia Constitution," he said. Carr commended the ruling and said he would "continue to defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Georgia." 

What next?
Abortion is a "core issue ahead of November's elections as voters weigh candidates and abortion-related ballot measures," The Washington Post said. Attention to reproductive rights has been "particularly intense" in Georgia, a key battleground state, since ProPublica reported last month that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died of abortion-related complications in the months after the ban took effect.

What happened
Human life expectancy has just about peaked, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Aging, and barring a transformative breakthrough in medical science, people will top out at a maximum average age of around 87 — 90 for women, 84 for men.

Who said what
"We're basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we're going to live," said lead author S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago. "We're squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies."

Life expectancy — an estimate of the average time a baby born in a given year might expect to live — is "one of the world's most important health measures," though an imperfect one, The Associated Press said. It "cannot account for deadly pandemics, miracle cures or other unforeseen developments that might kill or save millions of people."

Some scientists predicted that life expectancy would continue to rise "dramatically" as it had during the 20th century, "spurred on by innovations like water sanitation and antibiotics," The New York Times said. But Olshansky's study found that even if nobody died before 50, average peak life expectancy would barely rise, because our organs eventually fail.

What next?
Olshansky's "valuable addition to the mortality literature" persuasively showed that "we are reaching a plateau," University of Texas researcher Mark Hayward told the AP. But some future breakthrough could still change that. Olshansky said the only way to radically increase our longevity would be to slow the aging process, a prospect he is "optimistic" about.