The bigger question is why the lawsuit was necessary under a Democratic president.

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 march felt like less a reaction to impending crisis and more the announcement of a rejuvenated feminist movement.

While S.B. 8 has succeeded in shutting down almost all abortions in Texas clinics, it has led to a surge in awareness of strategies for self-managing abortion that are all but imperceptible to anyone trying to enforce the law. Aid Access saw a spike in requests for services for about a week beginning on August 31, the day before the law took effect, a provider told me.

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.

Clinics in hostile states scrambled to shift their protocols and protect staff. South Dakota’s last abortion clinic, which relies on fly-in providers from out of state, went dark for seven months. All of this provoked an onslaught of calls to staff members and volunteers at abortion funds, who engaged in acts of unseen heroism to preserve access.

There are two ways to tell him this story. One is: We failed you. But another is: We survived.

The movement for abortion access—not just rights—has arrived, and it’s winning fights across the country.

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.