And yet, there was a sense of something — if not hope, then certainly resolve and energy — emanating from the crowd, small as it was. The coming together of even a few hundred people in unimaginable urban heat less than a day after George Bush’s nomination of a judge who has already picked up the endorsement of Operation Rescue seemed an indication that those who were there knew this was urgent and vital.

Vital enough that they stood uncomplaining in 100-degree heat, a circumstance that was not lost on the sun-baked rally leaders. “It’s a hot political climate,” began Carla Goldstein, of Planned Parenthood of NYC, invoking the first usage of a metaphor that was to be repeated many times during the next hour. She also relied heavily on the slightly limp sentiment that “It is not OK” to nominate a candidate who does not represent the majority of Americans in their support of a woman’s right to control her own reproductive choices.

Next to me, 24-year-old Joey Steel was handing out fliers, wearing a T-shirt that read “Somebody in Transylvania Loves Me.” Was he an organizer? “No, I’m with the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade,” said Steel, adding, “I’m from Cleveland.” Steel said he recently moved to New York to stay until Nov. 2. That’s the anniversary of Bush’s reelection, and a day on which Steel and his “comrades,” as he calls them, are planning massive demonstrations and what they hope will be an overthrow of the administration. “Spain has done it; Ukraine has done it; Bolivia has done it twice,” he said. “Look at what we get for sitting around and waiting for the Democrats to do it. We get the appointment of this cat,” — here Steel nodded toward the podium as if Roberts were standing there — “who believes that abortion should be illegal.” Asked if he thinks Roberts will be confirmed, Steel said, “Yes. I think he’ll be confirmed.”

At the podium, NARAL Pro-Choice New York director Kelli Conlin, looking extremely sunburned, was speaking, calling Roberts’ nomination “a momentous occasion,” in which the president was responsible for filling the shoes of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “Wait a minute,” said protester Dan Jacoby, a political essayist who was standing next to me. “I just had a vision of John Roberts filling Sandra Day O’Connor’s shoes. I’m liking this image.”

“This nominee does not pass muster,” Conlin was shouting, and the louder responses indicated that the crowd around us was growing. She urged everyone to send a message to Roberts and the Bush administration: “You are not the mainstream; you will not succeed.” Then, somewhat wanly, Conlin added, “no matter how many odds are stacked against us.”

When Planned Parenthood of New York City CEO Joan Malin got up and began to talk about escorting women to clinics, one lone man began to walk through the crowd, yelling, “Yeah, this guy don’t condone murder!” The swelling rally made room for him to pass and he did.

Public advocate Betsy Gotbaum took the podium and pointed out the knot of young men who had been standing near her holding signs since the beginning of the rally. “Look at those young boys. They know that this might be their sisters, it might be our children and our grandchildren” whose rights are at stake. Gotbaum also said pointedly that “we need to get Senator Clinton” — who has not yet made a statement about Roberts’ nomination, though her senior colleague Sen. Charles Schumer has — “on this case!”

This drew a particularly loud cheer.

Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields said she was “thrilled to see this impressive turnout on such short notice.” It was definitely approaching impressive, though wasn’t quite there yet. “Little did we know,” Fields continued, “when we marched together by the thousands in Washington last year that we’d be standing here so soon. But what we learned then and what we learned today is that we can organize on short notice.” Fields continued that now was the time to do so, because “if we lose ground on Roe v. Wade, we can lose ground on so many other of the civil rights that we have marched for and gone to jail for.”

At this, a woman behind us asked my teenage friend, who was not waving her NARAL sign, if she could borrow it and hold it aloft. She did.

When Dick Gottfried, chairman of the New York State Assembly health committee, spoke, he had a specific goal in mind, and it echoed Betsy Gotbaum’s. “When Hillary Clinton walks into a room, people stand up and cheer wildly,” he said. “The reason that millions and millions of Americans revere her is because they feel that in her heart she is a moral leader.” According to Gottfried, “Hillary Clinton has been given a gift; the gift of moral authority. But with that gift comes moral assignment.” Gottfried suggested that it is Clinton’s responsibility “to use that gift when it counts. This is one of those moments. Hillary Clinton must step forward on this moral issue to protect all of America and the Supreme Court from John Roberts.”

The ever-growing, seriously sweating doughnut of protesters applauded mightily.

State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick suggested that in the Bush administration, “the Rove propaganda machine is at full-tilt boogie,” and that Roberts “is a bad guy” and “an ideologue. She also coined the most successful — if slightly queasy — phrase of the rally: “We’ve got to Bork Roberts!”

Hey, it was better than state Assemblyman Jonathan Bing’s, who lamely announced that while he grew up watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” on PBS, we have to make sure that “the United States Supreme Court doesn’t become Mr. Roberts’ neighborhood.”

“Good one,” said my companion very, very dryly, shooting me an unenthusiastic thumbs-up.

At the edge of the now rather impressive crowd, Judith Bendewald, 64, was standing with a 19-year-old friend, Hong Zheng, her former student from I.S. 131 in Chinatown. “I was around before Roe v. Wade,” said Bendewald. “I lost an aunt in the 20s or 30s — I didn’t know her — but she had an illegal abortion. She was even married! But they didn’t have any money, and she got an infection and died.”

Zheng, now a student at SUNY New Paltz, said that this was one of the first rallies she’d ever been to. When asked why she was here, she replied, “Ms. Bendewald tells me that it was really hard to get what we have today and we have to fight to keep it. All I know is that I’m going to do what I can to keep him out of the Supreme Court.”

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.