In early February, a group of Black activists from a range of reproductive rights and justice organizations in Texas gathered at an Airbnb in Dallas.

The last patient of the day sat in a blue recliner in the recovery room at Trust Women in Wichita, Kan. It was late afternoon on August 1, one day before Kansans would vote on whether to keep the right to abortion in the Kansas Constitution.

In interviews with more than 50 advocates, analysts, abortion providers and legal experts, what emerged is a sense of the movement being forced to reckon with its mistakes.

The nurses find themselves facing a bizarre and formidable foe: a multibillion-dollar corporation running a hospital where business executives sit beside Catholic leaders on the board of directors and where, despite more than two decades of for-profit ownership, reproductive health care is restricted by Catholic doctrine.

When conservative legal provocateur Jonathan Mitchell published his 2018 law review article laying the groundwork for Texas to ban most abortions, some of the ideas he outlined were so far-fetched that they read more like thought experiments than legitimate legal theories.

Last spring, several weeks after she was forced to lay off all six of her employees at Planned Parenthood’s North Austin Health Center, Katie Dickerson was summoned to a Zoom meeting. On the screen was a balding attorney named Michael Abcarian. His law firm, Fisher Phillips, helps employers with “maintaining your union-free status.” Dickerson would later write that the meeting left her so terrified for her job that she spoke of it only to her mother.

In Mexico, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and public officials are all trying to prevent rape survivors from accessing legal abortion.

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood workers are under tremendous stress and expecting a “tidal wave of need.” Now they’re organizing to protect and improve abortion care by ending chronic understaffing and low wages at clinics.

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade, access to abortion has collapsed across the country, and Democrats in Washington don’t have the votes to undo the decision right now. It’s a mess! But we may be able get Roe back sooner than it seems—if Democrats and their allies in the reproductive rights movement learn from years of their own missteps, and quickly. That will determine whether restoring the right to abortion takes six months or 60 years.

“Judge Robert Pitman said what advocates in Texas and clinics operators in Texas have been saying all along … a near-total ban on abortion in the state of Texas is flagrantly unconstitutional,” says Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation.