But the clinics in these two far-flung towns—Odessa and neighboring Midland—were struggling to say open long before HB2, the law that prompted the Supreme Court case, went into effect. Odessa’s Planned Parenthood closed in 2012, and the one in Midland followed in 2013, on the heels of cuts to state family-planning dollars.

For Hildebrand and Holeva, HB2 was the final salvo in what had been an uphill battle to provide abortions in an overwhelmingly Christian oil town. Their experience helps explain how lawmakers across the country have been able to pass so many abortion restrictions in recent years. They offered a glimpse at the myriad legal, financial, and cultural obstacles they faced—many of which are still the reality for abortion providers in Texas and elsewhere.

T

he year Midland began offering abortion services, 1995, Hildebrand said she was on the news 52 times. Around town, everyone recognized her.

“You go into a restaurant with your family, and people would hold up their menus and talk about you and point and stare,” she said. “And you're just hoping your kids are on their best behavior because people are judging you.”

When Hildebrand was pregnant, strangers would say, “I thought you hated babies. Why are you having one?”

At the clinic, pro-life groups waited in the dark for staffers to arrive or tampered with the lock on the clinic door. When the clinic was being remodeled, one of the contractors quit because his life was threatened, the women said.

It was only the Midland clinic that offered abortions, and only on one or two days each week. Because of legal restrictions on funding, the clinic split into two entities. On abortion days, the one that provided abortions would lease the building from the one that didn’t. On those days, up to two dozen women streamed in from 50 surrounding counties. Some woke at dawn to drive four hours through the dusty panhandle plains.

The state’s legal requirements meant women covered by certain government programs received incomplete information. While privately insured pregnant women could be told about abortion services, women who came in under a government program called Title XX remained in the dark. If those women asked about abortion, Planned Parenthood staffers had to tell them, “you'll have to look it up in the Yellow Pages,” Holeva said.

For the first few years after the Midland clinic began providing abortions, there was an “eerie quiet,” as Holeva describes it. Then, practically overnight, the protesters materialized. One group wore matching Jesus robes. Another had what Holeva calls “Mary on a surfboard”—a statuette of the virgin mother affixed to a plank. “It was like a three-ring circus,” she said.

One group, Pro-Life Midland, bought the land across the street and made a graveyard with dozens of crosses—one for each aborted fetus. They used it as a “prayer garden” for rallies.