If you are a woman who is pregnant in North Dakota you are supposed to think, above all, about heartbeats—but not your own, or about anything you might fear. New state laws, signed by the governor a few days ago, ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is generally at about six weeks, or before many women even know they are pregnant; prohibit ending a pregnancy because of genetic abnormalities, even ones that mean brief lives of pain for the baby; and add requirements about hospital-admission privileges that may close down the only abortion provider in a state that stretches more than two hundred miles from north to south, and three hundred and forty across. (Tammi Kromenaker, who runs the clinic, told the Washington Post that they’d try to find a way to stay open; there is only one abortion clinic in South Dakota, too.) That is a wide open space to drive across, wondering about your options.

The North Dakota laws, which go into effect August 1st, join a series of new abortion measures that play on emotions—hearing the heartbeat, the moment in all the movies where people cry—while stripping away the respect that women deserve and the sympathy that it might just be decent to give them. They are probably unconstitutional, as is a law that just passed in Arkansas banning abortion after twelve weeks. (The guidance from Roe v. Wade gives women until about twenty-two to twenty-four weeks.) And on Tuesday, the Alabama state legislature, too, passed laws that will make it harder for clinics to stay open. Irin Carmon, over at Salon, has a look at the game-theory approach here: there is an argument that anti-abortion-rights forces have overreached, and even set themselves up for a rebuke from the courts. But, as Carmon points out, there would be a lot of law, and a lot of disrupted lives, between now and then, and, always, there’s the potential for a higher-court ruling that would damage abortion rights. The new laws might also serve to normalize less theatrical restrictions. Gail Collins, in the Times, blamed North Dakota’s oil boom, and the revenues it brought, for the sudden bout of extremism, and the readiness to spend money on legal fees in pursuit of a precedent.

One wonders, given all the states that are rushing to limit abortion laws, if a woman’s right to choose might end up looking like the right to vote did three score years ago—exercisable in some states but constrained to nonexistence in others. The heartbeat bill is a new grandfather clause, the provider restrictions a new poll tax.

It is clear that there is a fight, and that the various forces are scattered. Confusion, including about the limits of medical science, is mixed with distracting counterfactuals about just how one might have rephrased the Roe decision to make everyone nicer about what is, in the end, a question of women’s rights and privacy, of public passions, and of navigating hard moments when something, undeniably, has gone wrong. But what would a society look like in which no one had access to a safe and legal abortion, or only the geographically lucky did? Maybe, soon, like a woman on her own in a dirty back room in North Dakota, with no good place to go from there.

Photograph, of an abortion-rights rally at the state capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota, by James MacPherson/AP.