Denise Lavoie/Associated Press

Legislation banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy is becoming law in North Carolina after the state's Republican-controlled General Assembly successfully overrode the Democratic governor's veto. The House completed the second and final part of the override Tuesday night after a similar three-fifths majority voted for the override earlier Tuesday in the Senate. The outcome represents a major victory for Republican legislative leaders who needed every GOP member on board to enact the law over Gov. Roy Cooper's opposition. The vote comes as abortion rights in the U.S. faced another tectonic shift with lawmakers also debating laws to sharply limit abortion in South Carolina and Nebraska.

A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court decision that temporarily blocks the enforcement of South Carolina's fetal heartbeat law. The law would ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. South Carolina's law requires doctors to perform ultrasounds to check for fetal cardiac activity. Once activity is detected, the abortion can only be performed if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or if the mother's life is in danger. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster signed the law last year, but it was immediately challenged in a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood. In its ruling Tuesday, a 3-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lewis, who suspended the law on its second day in effect.

After a Black man with intellectual disabilities was enslaved, beaten and forced to work more than 100 hours a week without pay in a South Carolina restaurant, his manager was sentenced to prison and ordered to pay $273,000 in restitution. But a federal appeals court recently ruled the man is entitled to double that amount under federal labor laws.