Michigan is one of the many states where reproductive rights have been perpetually under siege since the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. “The right-wing extremists have lost none of their momentum,” says Chelian, who has seen the ebb and flow of reproductive battles for 30 years. “In fact, it has picked up since George Bush has been in office.”

It is in these states where the battle is intensifying, not only to put limits such as parental consent on abortion, and to inhibit family planning — even preventing women from getting emergency contraception and the birth control pill — but ultimately to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Indeed, the April 25 march on Washington, supported by a range of reproductive-rights groups from across the country, is propelled by a new urgency: Conservative politicians in more than a dozen states have been pushing radical anti-abortion legislation that, if it were to pass, would almost certainly thrust the issue before the Supreme Court once again. With vacancy on the top bench imminent, and with George W. Bush potentially deciding who fills the seat (or seats) if he wins reelection, that’s a chilling prospect for advocates of reproductive rights.

Just last month, South Dakota came within one vote of enacting a sweeping anti-abortion law that would have outlawed the procedure entirely at any stage of pregnancy with the only exception being that of saving the woman’s life. Republican Gov. Mike Rounds and many South Dakota legislators boasted that the law could become the nation’s first direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade should George W. Bush get reelected and have the opportunity to appoint several anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. The apparent strategy is to enact an unconstitutional law in order to draw a court challenge that would make its way up to the Supreme Court — just as Bush’s appointees are joining other conservatives on the bench.

While the bill in South Dakota failed this time, it had passed both houses of the state Legislature. Despite supporting the bill, Gov. Rounds sent it back to the general assembly with a few technical changes. It came within a hairbreadth of passing a second time, even though it was such an extreme measure that the anti-abortion advocacy organization National Right to Life didn’t support it, stating that it was “the right bill at the wrong time.” Not only would it have banned the procedure, but it would have imposed a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Because the vote was so close, that probably won’t be the last time the South Dakota Legislature takes up the measure.

“We’ve been a testing ground for the most radical things they can dream up,” says Thelma Underberg, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota. “I checked the names of the people who testified [at the bill's hearing]. Very few people who testified were from South Dakota. It was well orchestrated by the Thomas More Law Center of Michigan, which was started by that fellow that owned Domino’s Pizza,” says Underberg, referring to Tom Monaghan, a conservative who has been a major funding source for anti-abortion and anti-gay activism. “They came in and got a legislator who was willing to carry the legislation.”

South Dakota isn’t the only state that has attempted to ban abortion outright. A bill in the Georgia Legislature would “provide that any person seeking to have an abortion … shall first file a petition in the Superior Court.” The bill also stipulates that the woman must have a jury trial, and that the court shall balance the rights of the fetus against the rights of the person seeking to have an abortion, and finally that “no abortion shall take place unless ordered by the court.”

In one of the more macabre state-level anti-abortion tactics, a bill was introduced to the Oklahoma Legislature that would require a woman considering an abortion to obtain a death warrant. “That bill would prohibit a physician from performing an ‘execution’ without obtaining a death warrant,” says Anita Fream of Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma. “It’s anybody’s guess what that referred to. But we see between 15 and 20 anti-choice bills of various kinds every year, so you can’t stay on top of them all. For example, we’ve had a bill proposed that would allow any minor who got an abortion without parental consent to sue the physician for malpractice without any statute of limitations, even though minors aren’t required to get parental consent in Oklahoma.”

Iowa is another state that is considering a bill that would require a woman to obtain permission from a judge before getting an abortion. Under this measure, the judge would appoint a guardian for the embryo or fetus and then conduct a mini-trial to determine if she should be forced to go forward with the pregnancy. There is no exception in this legislation for the health or even life of the woman. “That bill was so extreme, even the leadership [of the state legislature], which is anti-choice, didn’t let the bill go forward,” says Brenda Kole of NARAL Pro-Choice Iowa.

According to Planned Parenthood, 14 states have introduced 29 bills banning abortion outright.

“There has been a long-term strategy to make abortion illegal at the state level,” says Nancy Northup, an attorney and the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City. “What people don’t understand is that states want to have these laws on the books and ready to go when Roe is challenged again in the Supreme Court. Two states, Alabama and Delaware, have pre-Roe anti-abortion laws still on the books. And two more states, Louisiana and Utah, have passed laws to make abortion illegal since Roe. Those state laws, and any others that are passed in the meantime, will immediately go into effect should Roe be overturned.”

Not all attempts to severely restrict abortion are quite so blatant. Back in Michigan, two court cases have already been fought over so-called partial-birth abortion laws, where the legislation was struck down both times on the grounds that the wording was so vague that abortions as early as 10 weeks could be restricted.

“If they would pass a narrowly tailored bill to ban a specific procedure,” says Chelian, referring to intact dilation and extraction, “we probably wouldn’t even challenge it. But they keep coming back with this vague language, so we go to court, and every time we win the case, we also get to collect attorney’s fees from the state. It’s the state that has to pay for the court challenge, not the anti-choice groups who push it through. It’s such a waste of the taxpayers’ money.”

Most recently, the Michigan Legislature passed the Legal Birth Definition Act that — in addition to including the vague partial-birth language yet again — defines fetal viability so vaguely as to allow restrictions on abortion in the first trimester. Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed the bill, but a rarely used citizen’s initiative will likely succeed in getting it enacted anyway. In Michigan, if enough signatures are collected in support of a bill, it must be taken up by the Legislature, and if it passes with a simple majority, it automatically becomes law. The governor cannot veto it. More than enough signatures have been gathered and submitted to the secretary of state for verification, which will be certified sometime this month. Since the legislation already passed the Michigan Legislature once, it is all but guaranteed to succeed again, only this time the governor will have nothing to say about it. Once again, the courts will have to be the backstop.

“The [proponents of the citizen's initiative] are following an avenue that is allowed to them under the law,” says Liz Boyd, a spokeswoman for Gov. Granholm. “But any new law that is identical to the bill that the governor vetoed, which she did because it didn’t have an exception for the health of the woman, will be struck down by the courts.” The Michigan ACLU has already indicated it will bring a court challenge if the bill becomes law.

Not all attacks on a woman’s right to reproductive freedom are coming in the form of state legislation. Last fall a concrete supplier launched a boycott of a new clinic being built by Planned Parenthood in Austin, Texas. The boycott spread to every contractor in a 60-mile radius. After the initial setback, Planned Parenthood was besieged with calls from people willing to help. Planned Parenthood became its own contractor and has had to protect its subcontractors from harassment by refusing to release the companies’ names. Still, protesters show up at the construction site with zoom lenses and threaten to post photographs of workers on the Web. Despite the ongoing harassment, the clinic’s construction schedule is back on track and is set to open in the fall of 2004.

Of course, the anti-abortion movement hasn’t limited itself to stopping abortion.

Women’s right to reproductive freedom has come under such severe attack that access to emergency contraception and even the pill are increasingly threatened. Just last month, two cases arose in Texas that seem to be isolated incidents but are in fact part of a larger trend. In one case a pharmacist in Denton, Texas, refused to fill a woman’s emergency contraception prescription — even though she had just been raped. The drug store chain, Eckerd, immediately fired the pharmacist.

Another pharmacist in north Texas refused to fill a 32-year-old woman’s prescription for the pill. Julee Lacey, a wife, mother and first-grade teacher, was incensed and took her story to the media. In this case, the pharmacy was CVS. “Our constituents who are outraged about this want to support pharmacies that react quickly and do the right thing, as Eckerd did,” says Emily Snooks, executive director of Planned Parenthood of North Texas. “Well, now we come to find out that CVS is buying Eckerd. We can’t get an answer out of CVS about what they’re going to do to prevent this from happening again and whether or not that pharmacist will be terminated.”

CVS has said that if a pharmacist objects to filling a prescription, he or she should refer the customer to a pharmacist who can be of assistance. Beyond that, the company hasn’t elaborated on its policy or said if any disciplinary action was taken against the pharmacist who refused to dispense the pill. As it stands, Texas law does not protect pharmacists who object to filling certain prescriptions, but that may change. So-called conscious-clause legislation, which seeks to protect pharmacists from having to fill prescriptions that they morally object to, is yet another trend sweeping state legislatures.

While most of the proposed conscious-clause bills started out by protecting pharmacists who don’t want to dispense RU-486, also known as an abortifacient, Virginia has gone so far as to consider a bill that would declare fertilization as the beginning of life. This would classify emergency contraception, the pill, the IUD and other methods of contraception that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus as abortifacients. Pharmacists who are already exempt from having to dispense RU-486 could not be fired by the company for refusing to dispense birth control and emergency contraception under this definition.

After a pharmacist in Cincinnati was terminated for refusing to dispense the pill and emergency contraception at least 10 times during her seven years of employment at K-Mart, a conscious-clause bill was introduced in the Ohio Legislature to protect pharmacists from being disciplined. “Wider access to emergency contraception is the single most promising avenue for reducing this country’s rate of unintended pregnancy,” says Chrisse France, the executive director of Preterm, a nonprofit abortion clinic in Cleveland.

While pro-choice organizations and civil rights groups battle to keep contraception available, anti-abortion groups have opened another front: going after family planning funding. According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, just this year 12 states have introduced bills that would eliminate all family planning funding to organizations that even discuss the option of abortion or refer women to clinics that perform abortions. Last year, six states succeeded in defunding family planning: Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

“The [Texas] Legislature passed a bill that attempts to take away federal funding for family planning and require any family planning clinic to suspend any abortion services,” says Snooks, executive director of Planned Parenthood of North Texas. “All the Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas had to file a lawsuit against the state and get an injunction. The court will hear testimony regarding this issue on May 3. If we lose, that would be a loss of $13 million to clinics across Texas.

“If people knew that contraception is now being threatened, they would be outraged,” continues Snooks, who believes that people are starting to wake up to what’s happening at the state level. “We have a whole contingent of people going to Washington, D.C., for the march,” says Snooks. “Most people don’t think of North Texas as a hotbed of activism, but people are getting upset.”

A more direct – and less theocratic – answer would be that this one got through because of the nature of the ban, which allows Republicans in an election year to once again accuse Democrats of waging the real war on women. Or, as the National Right to Life Committee put it, “Members who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting they are resisting a ‘war on women’ must reflect on whether they wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls.” In other words, this is about making Democrats squirm – not unlike what’s happening in reverse in the Senate.

Franks previously tried to attach his bill to the Violence Against Women Act, which has turned into another political cudgel. He made another concession when he dropped the “racial discrimination” provisions of the bill, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank aptly described as “the latest attempt to protect racial minorities from themselves.” Under the rules through which it was introduced, Franks’s Prenatal Non-Discriminational Act (PRENDA) needs two-thirds of the House to pass, meaning it needs roughly 50 votes from Democrats.

Today happens to be the third anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who provided abortions in the most difficult cases amid actual violence, the daily threat of such violence, and politicized law enforcement tactics. PRENDA would ask the already besieged physicians still alive to police their patients’ decisions – especially their Asian-American patients, who would be singled out for disparate care – and to subject doctors to a fine or a up to a year in prison, or both. It’s utterly unconstitutional of course. Unless you’re in a state where later abortions are limited to special circumstances like threat to life, the United States doesn’t interfere, and rightly so, with a woman’s reason for having an abortion.

In the U.S., this is a “solution” in search of a problem. Even in immigrant communities that show very limited evidence of more boys being born than girls later in the birth order, abortion is far from the only mechanism available to sort for sex. Half of American fertility clinics offer some possibility of sorting by sex before a pregnancy. But if you ask people who actually work on this issue in Asia, where skewed sex ratios – whether achieved through IVF, abortion or even infanticide — can be socially destabilizing, they’ll tell you that limiting reproductive freedom isn’t the answer. The only mechanism that has changed anything (the go-to example is South Korea, where abortion is technically illegal but widely tolerated) is moving toward a more gender-equitable society where life as a woman is less of a burden. Part of that equitable society includes women making the decision when and if to be mothers. Seeking to chip away at that right is the true hypocrisy.

UPDATE: While a majority of the House voted in favor of PRENDA Thursday, 247-168, it did not pass since Republicans called it up under rules requiring a two-thirds majority.

What spurred such rage? Nothing so incendiary as transvaginal ultrasounds or birth control — just the Paycheck Fairness Act, which passed the Democratic House in 2009 but fell to a filibuster by two votes in the Senate in 2010. It modifies the 1963 Equal Pay Act, strengthening enforcement and creating better mechanisms for wage transparency, and authorizes new research on the pay gap and a grant program to teach negotiation skills to women and girls. And while it probably doesn’t have a prayer in the House — if it can even pass this Senate — it manages to bring feminist-friendly legislation back on the table while doubling as a political tool to force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner.

Better yet, it gets to the subject Republicans have intermittently accused Democrats of obfuscating: the economy. As Sen. Patty Murray taunted in a press conference, “To those Republicans who claim to be so concerned about the economy, now is your chance to sign on, When women are not paid what they deserve, middle-class families and communities pay the price.”

Whatever happens with the Paycheck Fairness Act (likely nothing) or the dueling versions of the Violence Against Women Act, this week also saw a bill move that, if it makes it into law, would represent a rare, if tiny, expansion of abortion access on the federal level. That would be the Shaheen Amendment, named for another female Democratic senator, which allows female servicemembers — who suffer disproportionate levels of sexual assault — insurance coverage for abortion in cases of rape and incest. (Currently, the Department of Defense offers coverage only if the woman’s life is in danger, a much more limited policy than that of other federal employees.)

The amendment passed in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, with three Republican votes — Sens. John McCain, Scott Brown and Susan Collins. (Democrat Ben Nelson voted against it). Of course, if it manages to get through the full Senate, it has the anti-choice House to contend with. That it would be incredibly narrow says a lot about the state of reproductive rights in this country — after all, rape and abortion exceptions are a compromise that, while reflecting American public opinion, truly jibe with neither side’s actual worldview. But you have to start somewhere, and a time of heated political rhetoric about women’s rights is as good as any other.

“He said that the congresswoman could, if she desired, sit on the dais of the hearing, but she would not be allowed to speak,” Norton told Salon after the hearing. She declined an offer she said “no self-respecting member” would accept.

“I certainly didn’t give them that optic,” she said drily.

Franks was technically within his rights – per the rules, the Democratic minority was granted one witness, D.C. resident Christy Zinks, who had an abortion at almost 22 weeks after the detection of a severe fetal abnormality. Still, as Norton pointed out, “there is a long tradition that goes back more than a century of allowing members to testify on a bill that may touch upon the district.” Nancy Pelosi also condemned the move.

In the testimony she wasn’t allowed to give, Norton says the so-called Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act “is the first bill ever introduced in Congress that would deny constitutional rights to the citizens of only one jurisdiction in the United States, and it is the first bill ever introduced in Congress that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.” Last year, House Republicans managed to strike a budget deal that would deny the District of Columbia the right to use its own Medicaid funds to pay for abortions — another byproduct of the fact that D.C. is ultimately under congressional oversight and has only partial self-governance.

Seven states have followed Nebraska in passing manifestly unconstitutional bans on later abortions without health exceptions, on the scientifically suspect notion that a fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks. So far, pro-choice organizations have declined to mount a legal challenge, for complicated reasons.

Norton called it a “stalking horse” for the overturning of Roe. “We understand we’re the vehicle, we know we’re not the object of affection,” she said. “What they want from the Congress is a federal imprimatur to continue their march in the states, to say, even the Congress has voted for a bill to limit abortion to 20 weeks.”

The National Right to Life Committee has called the bill its “top congressional priority for 2012,” and will score members based on their votes, even though it likely has no chance of getting past the Senate – or the president. “They are serious about this bill,” Norton told Salon. “They’re not playing.”

That said, she thinks that despite Franks’ zeal, other House Republicans have lost their zeal for fighting what’s still being called the war on women. An earlier Franks bill, seeking to limit race- and sex-selective abortions, didn’t make it to the floor. And on the House version of the Violence Against Women Act, fiercely opposed by the White House and women’s groups, “They keep saying that they’re working on a way to reach an accommodation, and for them, that is unusual to say,” Norton said.

“They didn’t anticipate the way the war on women, as it is called, has boiled up to the surface,” Norton said. “And they’re trying to quell it somewhat.”

“Our concern is for the privacy of these women and for their health and safety, for which Central Family Planning has shown very little regard,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman – while posting photographs of the documents, partially redacted in black marker, online.

Antiabortion activists want to create the impression that one way or another, a woman’s decision to have an abortion will be discovered and exposed. The Central Family Medical incident is only the latest skirmish in a decades-long effort to undermine the privacy of abortion patients and harass doctors. In the early ’90s, for example, at least one group of clinic protesters printed on their signs the names of women seeking abortions that day, alongside “don’t kill your baby.” Such actions, while failing to make abortion illegal, have nevertheless managed to cloak it in a stigma that belies the fact that one in three women will have an abortion before the age of 45. Now, activists are seeking new ways to shame women who seek abortions, from requiring them to hand over personal information to actually hacking into their medical records.

Kansas has been ground zero for this: Last year, the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys recommended that former Attorney General Phill Kline, a hero to Operation Rescue, have his legal license suspended indefinitely for mishandling the records from murdered abortion provider George Tiller’s clinic. (The Kansas Supreme Court will make the final call.) But the zeal to keep, and sometimes steal, abortion records casts a wide net.

In Texas, the state Department of Health is trying to implement a failed legislative measure that would require abortion clinics to report far more information about their patients to the state. In Florida, voters will weigh in on a ballot measure that would exempt abortion from the privacy clause in the state constitution, with the short-term aim being to strip minors of a right to privacy that would preclude parental consent. The U.K. recently jailed a hacker who stole and intended to publish the records of 10,000 women who visited the country’s largest abortion provider.

“It promotes the idea that abortion – or your privacy, if you have any – is not safe,” says Katie Stack, a graduate student and activist who spoke out about her abortion on an MTV special, “No Easy Decision.” That put her in close contact with the “online ministry” – the name antiabortion activists have given their efforts to reach women considering abortions through the Internet.

This has been the unstated goal of many activists in the antiabortion movement — and, sometimes, the stated one. “This might sound a little strange,” said antiabortion activist Lila Rose at the Value Voters Summit in 2009, but “if I could insist, as long as they are legal in our nation, abortions would be done in the public square, until we were so sick and tired of seeing them that we would do away with the injustice altogether … maybe then we might hear angels singing when we ponder the glory of conception.”

Rose won’t get her wish any time soon, but antiabortion activists are trying to use the Internet to have a similar effect. Rose was recently on a panel at the International Pro-Life Youth Conference about social media and pro-life activism, where topics included targeting women who are seeking information about abortion online, whether through Yahoo Answers or YouTube commenters – including figuring out where they live and recommending a crisis pregnancy center nearby.

“Privacy is very important to women who have abortions,” says Kate Cockrill, program director of the Social and Emotional Aspects of Abortion project, at the University of California, San Francisco. She points out that abortion is traditionally underreported even in confidential surveys, “which is a good indication that women don’t want to be associated with abortion experience in the eyes of someone who’s gathering data, even if it’s anonymous.”

Cockrill recently conducted a survey, as yet unpublished, that seeks to measure the impact of social stigma on women who’ve had abortions. It asked 641 women who had had abortions about 61 items, including questions about the fear people would gossip about you, judge you or hurt you, or the fear that you would lose an important relationship.

So far, she’s found that the women who experienced the most stigma were worried about being judged more than they were about being hurt or harmed, that they feared loss of social status and the ruining of their public identity, that they felt isolated and guilty, and that they feared community condemnation.

But as with other abortion restrictions, which create extra burdens in the supposed service of changing women’s minds, it’s not clear that anyone’s mind is being changed.

“Lots of women who feel a lot of stigma about abortions have abortion anyway,” Cockrill says. “If it’s not doing what antiabortion people want it to do, which is reducing the number of abortions, is it doing something on the other end, [after the fact]?”

Cockrill and her team are going to be using their scale in a study next year to look at the relationship between stigma and poor coping after abortion. Given that antiabortion activists have added to their obsessions the alleged harm abortion causes to women, there’s reason to believe that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Women who have abortions, Cockrill says, “have a huge range of political views.” In fact, in her survey, only 62 percent of the women identified as pro-choice. (Seven percent identified as prolife, and 18 percent described their position as “mixed or neither.”)

“A lot of women don’t experience their abortions as a political act,” Cockrill says, partly an extension of the fact that they don’t see it as constitutive of their identity.

Whether it’s political rhetoric or individual ambivalence, these women are highly sensitive about whom they tell they had abortions. Sixty-four percent of the women in the study said they’d “withheld information about my abortion to someone I’m close to,” and 45 percent said they’d “lied to someone I’m close to about my abortion.”

They may not see it as political, but that silence functions as a vicious circle that antiabortion activists happily seize upon and promote. Cockrill says, “Some people say, ‘We need to have more people come out about their abortions.’ But it’s impossible to get more women to talk about their abortions if they don’t feel supported. And it needs to be on women’s own terms.”

On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge didn’t buy the state’s legislation defunding Planned Parenthood, putting a temporary stay on the enforcement of the law. But within a day, there was another judge who found the argument persuasive: Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, last seen obnoxiously demanding that a female Justice Department lawyer ”submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.” (Kevin Drum memorably compared it to “a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before,” and you wouldn’t have to look hard to find the sexist condescension.)

The District Court judge had written 24 pages on the constitutional merits, focusing on Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights of association. Smith issued two sentences two hours after the state’s petition, undoing that, and apparently buying the state of Texas’ argument that Planned Parenthood’s alleged “abortion promoting” mission justified discriminating against a qualified provider of healthcare.  (The clinics receiving WHP funding don’t even provide abortions, but other Planned Parenthood clinics do.)

In an election year, these posturings take on new meaning; by today, Planned Parenthood was proclaiming in a news release, “What would Mitt Romney’s America look like for women’s health care?  We need look no further than Texas,” and highlighting the policy similarities of Romney and Perry on women’s health. Romney, of course, has pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, which during the primaries became a consensus Republican issue. The last federal attempt to do so, last year’s Pence Amendment, nearly shut down the entire government, though Obama held the line — as he pointed out in a recent campaign video supporting the organization.

The presidential policies matter, but as we can see from Texas, the judiciary, prompted by state legislatures that are coming off a wave of abortion restrictions, is currently wielding the most power when it comes to women’s everyday lives, and the 5th Circuit in particular has been unrepentantly hostile to reproductive rights. When they failed with Pence, right-to-lifers turned to the states, primed by the 2010 election of even more anti-choice legislators and governors. In Texas, the conservative 5th Circuit has become a brick wall, previously allowing enforcement of the most extreme ultrasound law in the country, one that requires a woman to listen to the results.

Smith is a Reagan appointee, as is his fellow 5th Circuit conservative gadfly Edith Jones, who wrote the opinion in the ultrasound case, though if they’re feeling particularly emboldened lately, you can’t really blame them. After all, the Obama administration has shown little interest in prioritizing the judiciary, even after Bush’s ambitious effort to fill federal appellate courts with movement conservatives. A January Brookings Institution report showed that Obama has nominated fewer federal trial judges than his predecessors, even as a wave of judges retires. (Unprecedented Senate intransigence is a major factor in confirmations, but doesn’t explain the nominations.)  And Dahlia Lithwick has argued that “Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has selected lower court judges more notable for their racial and gender diversity than their hard-left judicial orientation.”

All of this is to say that as long as states like Texas keep passing laws that punish women and stretch the boundaries of constitutional interpretation, to put it mildly, the buck is likelier than ever to stop at a judge like Jerry Smith.