In 1992, the Supreme Court surprised the nation yet again with a ruling on abortion. Many observers expected that the justices would use Planned Parenthood v. Casey to strike down Roe v. Wade, or at least sharply curtail the 1973 decision’s holding that the Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion. Four of the justices had indicated three years earlier, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, that they would vote to overturn the landmark ruling.

Indeed, notes from the court’s retired justices indicated that after oral arguments in Casey, there were five votes to strike down Roe. Then Justice Anthony Kennedy changed his mind. He crafted an unusual plurality decision with justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter that jettisoned Roe’s trimester framework for evaluating when states can restrict abortion. In its place, the troika erected a new legal standard: Courts must evaluate whether those restrictions are an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to obtain the procedure.

Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe’s wizened author, could not mask his surprise at the reversal of fortune. “All that remained between the promise of Roe and the darkness of the [Webster] plurality was a single, flickering flame,” he wrote in his concurring opinion. But Blackmun also knew the fight over reproductive rights was not over: “I fear for the darkness as four justices anxiously await the single vote necessary to extinguish the light.”

Twenty-six years later, the darkness has arrived. President Donald Trump’s nomination to the high court of Brett Kavanaugh, a reliably conservative judge who currently serves on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, will likely end the precarious balance that has protected abortion rights for the last quarter-century. Kennedy occasionally voted to uphold some restrictions in the years that followed Casey, but his presence effectively blocked any outright attempt to overturn Roe.

Kavanaugh has never explicitly said he would vote to overturn the 1973 decision. This isn’t surprising, since judges do not disclose how they would decide cases before they hear them. Nonetheless, he is the product of a concerted effort by the conservative legal movement to build a Supreme Court in its own image. His most prominent opinion on the subject came last year when he dissented from a D.C. Circuit ruling that allowed an undocumented immigrant teenager to obtain an abortion while in federal custody.