Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, directed the crowd from her makeshift command station at the center of the rotunda, beneath the dome designed with a giant Texas star. In all her years of organizing, she had never seen energy like this.
It was an afternoon in June 2013, and the line to enter the Senate chamber at the state capitol in Austin snaked up flights of stairs and encircled three levels of balconies. Mothers brought young daughters. Youth organizers brandished signs. People arrived after driving three hours from Houston after work. Women milled about in burnt-orange shirts, heeding the late-breaking call from feminist activists to “come early, stay late, wear orange,” the color of the Texas Longhorns and the only shirt shade available for organizers to purchase in large quantities at the last minute. They were a stark contrast to the portraits everywhere of the men who had governored Texas all the way back to the first presidents of the republic, who now stared out from gold frames.
For Richards, this moment was too critical to squander on a rookie organizing mistake. Texas was her home state. It was also where Roe started, when a pregnant waitress in Dallas named Norma McCorvey first filed a lawsuit against the state’s abortion ban in 1970. Ever since McCorvey won at the Supreme Court three years later, Texas conservatives had been trying to undo the decision. This time, their effort at a new abortion ban had reached a new—and potentially far more dangerous—level. But Richards looked around in awe. All these Texans had descended on the capitol to say no. It was a historic display of opposition in a conservative state. Even more dramatic than the women pouring into the Capitol was the scene inside the Senate chamber itself: a petite woman standing tall in salmon-pink running shoes, fighting for all of them.
Wendy Davis, a former teenage mother and current Democratic state senator, was mounting a one-woman stand against the Republican empire of Texas. To her supporters, she was “Joan of Arc,” charging into battle for women across the state. “She’s carrying every woman in the state of Texas, if you will, on her shoulders,” Richards told The New York Times.
Richards was impossible to miss in the crowd. Tall and slim, with a shock of white-blond hair and a slight Texas drawl, she was a politician in her own right, even if she still saw herself as the rabble-rousing union organizer she once was. Always impeccably tailored, usually styled in a bright sheath dress, Richards was warm, while holding back just enough to reveal only what she wanted seen. The daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, a legendary personality and feminist icon, Richards seemed to know just about everyone in the capitol on that day. There were friends from her mother’s political campaigns, members of the state legislature, and old Texas political hands, the lawyers and troublemakers who had been part of the stagnating liberal movement in the state for years. She fielded text updates from staffers inside the chamber and calls from Democratic officials who wanted reports.
Outside the building, there were shouts and protests. Inside, Richards wanted everyone to follow the rules, shared in advance by the coalition of abortion right activists. No talking. No booing. No clapping. Nothing that could jeopardize Davis’s chances, or prompt the Capitol police to throw her supporters out of the building. Public safety officers roamed the halls in their khaki uniforms and big cowboy hats, ready to bring out handcuffs at what felt like any moment. “Now might be a good time to put your ID in your bra,” Richards told the women standing near her. “That way you’ll have it if we get arrested later.” She hadn’t forgotten everything from her rough-and-tumble days as an organizer, Richards thought.
Senate Bill 5—or SB5, as it was called—would ban abortion at twenty weeks of pregnancy, directly undercutting the legal standard set in Roe. It would also impose restrictions that would likely force the closure of most of the state’s forty-two abortion clinics. The bill mandated that abortion facilities meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers—a requirement that would involve significant and largely unaffordable renovations—and that a doctor who performed abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, a credential many facilities in the conservative state were unwilling to grant. If enacted, it would be the most radical new law in the country. But about 60 percent of Texans supported banning abortion at 20 weeks, split largely on partisan lines.
Texas wasn’t the only state embracing these new restrictions. Even though the national Republican Party was wary of the push to end abortion, local Republicans in conservative states were embracing laws that went further than ever before—as Marjorie Dannenfelser had noticed. Nearly a dozen other states had already passed laws banning abortion at twenty weeks, the result of flagship model legislation pushed by the National Right to Life Committee. Other states were pushing even further, with twelve-week and six-week bans. After abortion-rights organizations sued, those earlier bans were enjoined by courts, making them unenforceable as the litigation moved forward. But some of the twenty-week bans stood.
A twenty-week federal ban would not stop many abortions. Only about 8,600 procedures in the country happened after that point in pregnancy in 2013, just 1.3 percent of the total that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Generally, abortions that late happened in tragic circumstances—situations like pregnancies resulting from child sexual abuse and life-threatening maternal and fetal conditions. But curbing abortion wasn’t the only point of the laws: the idea was to strike at the legal precedent set in Roe, which said abortion was legal until viability. That marker was now at about twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, about a month earlier than when Roe was decided in 1973, because of medical advances.
Democrats in Texas knew they had little hope of stopping the twenty-week ban. Republicans controlled the legislature and the governor’s mansion. They had called a special thirty-day legislative session and were trying to ram through the abortion bill at the very end. But Democrats came up with one last-ditch idea, and a woman to lead it: a filibuster. If their side could run out the clock, Democratic leaders knew, the special session would end before the Republicans could pass their bill. For everything to work, Davis had to get the microphone on the senate floor and keep talking until midnight, when the session ended. She could not sit, eat, drink, use the bathroom or even lean on her desk, or her filibuster would be declared dead, and the Republicans would call the vote. Davis would stand alone.
Richards had flown in from her offices in New York City to help manage the strategy. She was the most powerful symbol of abortion rights in the country, a Goliath commanding a force nearly unmatched in American politics. Planned Parenthood had about seven hundred health care centers, three primary national offices, and a political action arm backed by separate political action committees operating regionally and nationally. The legal office was essentially an in-house law firm. Its doctors participated in dozens of research studies and, in 2013, its lobbyists spent more than $1.5 million advocating for abortion rights and women’s health care. Internationally, they worked with more than one thousand partners in countries across the globe. The antiabortion movement had no such organization.
During her seven years at the helm, Richards had transformed Planned Parenthood from a women’s health organization struggling for influence into a feminist power symbol dripping in hot pink—the signature color of its brand. By the time Obama won reelection in 2012, Richards commanded seven million supporters and a budget of more than a billion dollars. She was a political superstar, twice named to Time magazine’s list of most influential people, with celebrity endorsers and an open door at the White House.
She also represented the prevailing view in America: that abortion should largely remain legal and that Roe, the law of the land for two generations, should stand.
In liberal America, the new Republican abortion bans felt outrageous and backward. The message Democrats had taken from Obama’s win was that America was shifting in their favor. They believed that a diversifying electorate of immigrants, young people, women, Black and Hispanic voters would be more liberal and overpower the white conservative Christians who had dominated Republican politics for decades. The arc of history was long, as Obama was fond of saying, but it was certainly bending toward their sense of liberal progress.
But the national promise of Roe had always been bigger than the reality, especially in Texas. For years, opponents had chipped away at abortion rights, with laws creating extensive rules for doctors, patients, and clinics that made it more difficult to get an abortion in the state. Texas required women seeking abortions to have transvaginal ultrasounds and waiting periods, and doctors to convey claims about the dangers of abortion. Many of those laws passed with little public outcry.
Now, abortion-rights activists were pushing back, with Davis as their champion. Early that morning, Richards had stopped by Davis’s office to wish her good luck. A sign hung on her door: STAND WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD.
“I want to make sure every senator has to walk by this sign on their way to the floor,” she told Richards.
In the Senate chamber at 11:18 a.m., after a doctor threaded a catheter into Davis’s bladder so she could avoid ending her thirteen-hour stand by leaving the floor to use the bathroom, Davis opened her thick binder of research, legal arguments, and some thirteen thousand testimonials from Texans speaking out in opposition to the bill. She read aloud a story from a seventeen-year-old girl named Ellen, who said she wanted to kill herself after a man raped her, until her mother took her to an abortion clinic to end the pregnancy. Patricia from Baylor said she felt the real sin was not abortion but carrying a child into the world and not being able to care for it. A man named Paul said that in Judaism, the health of the mother is paramount, the fetus considered to be a part of her body, not a person with preferential rights, and worried that the bill would impose Catholic or Baptist views that life begins at conception.
Davis wanted Republicans to listen to science. The Texas Medical Association, on behalf of its forty-seven thousand members, argued that the medical community should determine care, not legislators. The Texas district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said the bill flouted scientific practice by defining a two-week embryo as a “child”—a “child,” the doctors said, was a person from birth until eighteen. Davis dictated these statements into the record, her voice steady and strong.
After two hours and forty-six minutes, Davis flipped the page to the testimony of a woman named Carol from Austin. Her voice wavered, ever so slightly. At her twenty-week pregnancy appointment, Carol got the news that her baby girl had hydrops fetalis, a condition in which an abnormal amount of fluid had built up inside her, and that it would be terminal in her case. Carol had to make an impossible choice—go through with the birth and watch her child die, induce labor now, or have a dilation and extraction procedure. “When you are given the news that there is nothing that can be done to save your baby’s life, it feels like your soul has been ripped apart,” Davis read aloud from Carol’s letter, her voice slowing.
Until now, she had been able to stay strong. But she struggled to get through what came next. “I held her, kissed her, watched her get baptized, told her that I loved her, and I said goodbye,” Davis read, unable to stop her tears.
Her thoughts traveled to a memory. She had been elated when she got the news in the fall of 1996. It was her fourth pregnancy. Her first happened right after high school, when she was still a teenager living in a trailer park with her boyfriend, and it was followed by a shotgun marriage, a rapid divorce, and a series of low-end jobs. Her second happened much later, when she was remarried to Jeff Davis, a Princeton-educated lawyer, and taking the LSAT with dreams of getting into law school. Her third, an ectopic pregnancy, happened after she had worked her way through Harvard Law School and was practicing law back home in Texas. It ended with the removal of one of her fallopian tubes.
Davis prayed that if God willed it, she would get pregnant one more time. And at thirty-three, when she was mounting her first political campaign, running for city council of Fort Worth, it happened. Davis was determined that everything would go right this time. She read all the books. Ordered skim milk instead of wine. She even chose a name, Tate Elise.
The maternal fetal medicine doctor cried when he told Davis the diagnosis: Dandy-Walker syndrome. Tate’s brain had developed incorrectly, with parts that might never grow at all. Davis and her husband saw a specialist in obstetric neurological diagnoses, got a third and a fourth opinion. “Likely incompatible with life,” the doctors all said.
Davis remembered feeling Tate’s little body tremble inside her and sensed she was suffering. Weeping, she promised Tate that she would not experience further pain. In the medical office, with tears flowing down their faces, she and her husband watched her doctor still Tate’s beating heart.
After a delivery by C-section, Tate was brought to her in a tiny pink dress and knit cap. Davis held her, cried over her. They took photographs and had her baptized by an associate minister from their church. And as Davis lay in the hospital sobbing, her hand over her womb, Tate’s body was taken away and cremated. Davis would never forget the blackness that followed. The deep despair that came in crushing waves. When she emerged, after nearly a year, she was forever changed.
All these years later, it was still too personal, too painful, to share aloud. Davis kept reading.
Richards listened to the stories unfolding in the chamber. She had heard so many like them over the years. And she understood how personal they were. After having her daughter, followed by a set of twins, Richards had felt her family was complete. Then, she got pregnant again. The abortion wasn’t a particularly emotional decision. She did not feel guilty or anguished. Instead, she felt lucky. Having an abortion in Texas back in the 1990s wasn’t “the nightmare that it is now,” she reflected. But, like Davis, her experience also wasn’t something she went around sharing publicly.
The private nature of both of their stories underscored an inescapable reality of abortion. The issue wasn’t just political; it was deeply personal. Women understood intuitively how choices about pregnancy affected their lives. But the stigma and shame that surrounded the procedure kept the stories of women who had an abortion largely cloaked in silence. For abortion-rights supporters, the public debate was most often conducted not in intimate terms but in the more bloodless language of medicine, law, and politics.
Younger abortion-rights activists were trying to grow those stories into a movement. It’s easier to deny someone rights when they are simply invisible, they reasoned. They encouraged women to, in a phrase coined by one activist online, “shout their abortion.” Social media helped spread their effort. That spring, a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked at an abortion clinic filmed and posted her own procedure. The video was viewed one million times, sparking a tsunami of responses, including some so threatening that YouTube disabled comments. But it inspired other young women, who began talking about their procedures online and at events on college campuses. Abortion-rights activists had used the internet to their advantage. And as Davis spoke in Texas, they were doing it again.
In the rotunda, women paced in slow circles around Richards, chanting, “Won’t go back.” Above them, women lined the balconies live streaming their protest to the world. With help from organizers at Planned Parenthood and their allies in the movement, the word spread on Twitter, then a relatively new social media platform with untold capacity for disruption. Outcry reached the highest levels of Democratic power. At 5:53 p.m., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted her support. Obama soon followed, with a tweet read out loud by a protester in the rotunda: “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.” Richards and Davis suddenly understood: people were following along with their fight—and not just in Texas. “The whole world is watching,” Richards realized.
By 10:30 p.m., #standwithwendy was being posted on Twitter 1,500 times per minute, huge numbers for the young social media platform. By the end of Davis’s filibuster, it was tweeted nearly 730,000 times. The online moment was so notable that Twitter’s founder would later tout it as illustrative of his technology’s ability to foster grassroots democracy.
Richards was amazed by how the wave of resistance in her home state inspired people across the nation. Generally speaking, abortion rights didn’t energize supporters as much as opponents of the issue. In the run-up to the 2012 election, only about four in ten Democratic voters and 29 percent of independent voters said abortion would be very important to their vote—far less than the 51 percent of Republicans who said the same. That dynamic made sense: it was a basic rule of politics that those pushing for change—like the Republicans who wanted to roll back Roe and abortion rights—tended to be more motivated than the voters who were comfortable with the status quo.
That enthusiasm gap between the two parties meant that in election after election, Democratic voters dismissed risks to abortion rights as little more than political posturing, the same-old, decades-long battle. Even after Republican statehouses began passing a deluge of abortion restrictions in 2011, research found that voters who supported abortion rights remained largely unaware of the new laws or how the landscape was starting to shift. Over the course of 2013, Tresa Undem, a pollster who studied issues related to gender, conducted 150 focus groups with independent and Democratic women. When she’d flash a list of abortion restrictions on a screen, the women would be shocked and outraged—Who is passing these, they would ask, and why didn’t I know about this?
Now, activists in Texas put abortion rights front and center across America, including in liberal states that hadn’t really understood those rights were at risk. An issue that a majority of the country believed to be settled law suddenly drove the political narrative. To Richards, it felt like a national awakening to the new threats abortion rights faced in conservative states, and it was thrilling.
Richards and many of her liberal allies believed that this was how progress happened. With the right organizing efforts, personal beliefs could grow into mass actions, which could change laws. If her side could convince enough of their supporters to speak out in protest, they could show Republican legislators in Texas that they would pay a political price for restricting abortion and convince them to abandon this law. The abortion-rights movement had drawn its own lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights era. In the years before Roe, King spoke of the intertwined relationship between his movement and Planned Parenthood’s. He praised the group’s founder, Margaret Sanger, for her nonviolent actions promoting birth control, which he said made his own movement more resolute. For King, mass demonstrations were necessary to shift the country. By organizing, and marching, they could force the government to act. “We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action,” he wrote in a letter to Planned Parenthood in 1966. “We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action.”
That’s exactly what Richards hoped was happening over all those hours in the Texas Capitol, as Davis spoke and Republicans tried to find ways to end her filibuster. They gave Davis one procedural strike when she discussed the state budget and Planned Parenthood funding, a reference that Republicans said was outside the scope of the current bill. When she put on a back brace with the help of a colleague, she received a second strike for accepting outside support. On the third, a simple majority of Republicans could vote to end debate, and she would have to yield the floor. That came two hours before midnight when she mentioned a previous law mandating a sonogram before getting an abortion. A gavel sounded, and the objection was upheld. “Let her speak! Let her speak!” opponents of the bill chanted from the upstairs gallery.
Davis could feel the floor vibrating from the stomping. Her Democratic colleagues tried to eat up time at the microphone, speaking in their slowest Southern drawls. With fifteen minutes to go, state senator Leticia Van de Putte attempted to address the floor. She kept getting overlooked, and at one point, her mic was cut off. When she finally got her moment, her emotion—not just about abortion rights but equal pay, women’s power, and how the issues that impact women the most are simply overlooked—exploded.
“At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?” she asked.
The crowd in the Senate gallery erupted. The clock ticked. Davis raised her fingers in a V—a sign for victory—and the crowd above grew so loud that it became impossible for Republicans to move forward with the legislation. The shouts grew like a wave, reverberating to the larger crowd outside the Senate chamber’s doors and then to Richards in the rotunda. Richards threw her arms in the air, signaling to raise the volume even more. The protesters started counting down the minutes. Davis pointed to the clock—“Midnight! It’s midnight!” she said.
At 12:03 a.m., three minutes past the deadline, the senate passed the bill, voting 19–10. The vote did not count, though Republicans spent hours arguing the legislation went through three minutes earlier. A screenshot on Twitter finally proved them wrong. Still, Davis couldn’t imagine that her Republican colleagues would flout the public outrage and bring the bill up again the next term. Around 3:00 a.m., she sent a text to Richards.
In the rotunda, surrounded by iPhones recording and streaming the moment, Richards read the message to the crowd: “First, I love you guys. The lieutenant governor has agreed that SB 5 is dead.” The deafening applause became a chorus of “The Eyes of Texas,” the fight song of the University of Texas Longhorns. Richards broke into a grateful smile, swelling with pride for what they had accomplished. “We love you too, Wendy,” she shouted. In deep-red Texas, she felt possibility, and hope. This night in Texas, a fuse had been lit, Richards thought, one she hadn’t seen since her mother won the state back in 1990.
Richards glanced up at the portrait of her late mother, the first woman to be governor of Texas elected in her own right, staring boldly out of her own gold frame in her royal-blue blazer, alongside the portraits of all the men. Richards had been eight months pregnant with twins, her toddler, Lily, in tow, when she watched her fifty-seven-year-old divorced, progressive, and recovering alcoholic mother, Ann Richards, become the state’s forty-fifth governor and hold up a T-shirt in victory: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE DOME! it said.
Oh, thought Richards, how Mom would have loved this.