The language of fear has been even plainer in the recent push by conservative Republicans to deny Planned Parenthood government funding. ‘‘Planned Parenthood is not a safe place for vulnerable women,’’ the president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America said on Fox News last summer, claiming that the group ‘‘coerces women into abortion’’ and ‘‘sells their baby parts.’’

These claims are not backed by evidence. But still the alarms ring, playing into our usual assumptions that the impulse to protect is benevolent and, perhaps, that women are especially deserving of solicitude. The association between ‘‘protection’’ and women is deeply embedded in culture. The image of the domestic-violence victim who receives a protective order is female, though men have the same right to go to court. Shakespeare described God’s protection of the king, but over the centuries, writers from E. M. Forster to Norman Mailer to Jonathan Franzen have rhapsodized about the male impulse to shelter women. Once in a while, a female character voices vexation. ‘‘I won’t be protected,’’ Lucy protests to her irritating suitor in Forster’s ‘‘A Room With a View.’’ ‘‘I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.’’

There’s no phrase for men equivalent to ‘‘damsel in distress’’ and no such thing as ‘‘protective’’ legislation for men. ‘‘No one says anything about sending men to surgical centers for colonoscopies,’’ says Kessler-Harris, who submitted a brief in the Texas case, along with 15 other historians. (Colonoscopies have a mortality rate more than 30 times as high as the rate for abortion.) ‘‘Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures performed in the United States,’’ states another brief by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association. The major medical groups were exceptionally blunt in disputing the protective rationale for the Texas law, saying there is ‘‘no medical purpose’’ for requiring abortion clinics to meet the standards for a surgical center. The admitting-privileges requirement for doctors ‘‘likewise does nothing to improve the health and safety of women.’’

The brief from the medical groups argues damningly that far from protecting women, the Texas law endangers them. By causing clinics to close, and thus forcing women to travel longer distances to have abortions, the law ‘‘has delayed, and in some cases blocked,’’ women’s access to the procedure. ‘‘Both outcomes jeopardize women’s health.’’

The main audience for these briefs is the court’s single swing voter on abortion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. He upheld the core of Roe v. Wade in 1992, but his latest opinion on abortion, in 2007, hinted of old-school paternalism. ‘‘Some women come to regret’’ their choice of abortion, Kennedy wrote then. ‘‘In a decision so fraught with emotional consequence, some doctors may prefer not to disclose precise details of the means that will be used.’’ In other words, to spare women from hearing about a type of late-term procedure, Kennedy permitted Congress to ban it. Contrast that to his stirring endorsement of liberty and equality in proclaiming a constitutional right to same-sex marriage last summer. For gay couples, Kennedy championed the ‘‘autonomy’’ to make ‘‘profound ­choices.’’ He has yet to express the same faith in women. It’s not hard to see, though, that Texas is ‘‘protecting’’ women at their peril.