But here’s where Maddow and the other worriers are wrong: litigators trying to uphold a woman’s right to an abortion are not running scared. In fact, they are being remarkably shrewd in their case selection. They’re bringing suits all over the country — they’re just not challenging every single state restriction, no matter where it’s enacted or how many women it affects. “We don’t jump when the other side says ‘Jump,’ ” says Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The bait that they have been wise to avoid involves the prohibition of abortion after 20 or 22 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion foes coined the term “partial-birth abortion” in the mid-1990s for a particular late-term procedure and later persuaded the Supreme Court to uphold Congress’s ban. Along the way, they reduced popular support for reproductive rights more broadly by making late-term abortion seem as if it were the norm rather than the exception. Yet only 1.5 percent of abortions occur late in the second trimester. And in three of the five states that recently banned the procedure, no doctor provided late-term abortions anyway. In other words, these particular restrictions are largely symbolic. If the abortion rights groups were to sue, they would risk returning to dangerous political ground.

Instead, lawyers representing their side have been challenging the laws that hurt women most — which are also the ones most likely to sway public opinion back to their side. Can it really be good politics for a state to tell private health insurers what kind of coverage for women’s health they can and can’t provide? Or to take away the money that allows Planned Parenthood to prescribe birth control and treat S.T.D.’s? Quinnipiac and CNN polls from earlier this year both found majority support for continuing government financing of Planned Parenthood. There’s also a clear argument against laws like the ones that permit Virginia to regulate abortion clinics like hospitals or that allow Louisiana to immediately close an abortion clinic for any technical rule violation. In making early abortions more burdensome and costly, these laws take aim at the ordinary version of the procedure that women experience and for which support is greatest. In a 2007 poll, Gallup found that twice as many people favor making late-term abortion illegal than favor overturning Roe (72 percent versus 35 percent).

Abortion rights advocates are also trying to prevent South Dakota from mandating that women wait a full 72 hours for an abortion. This comes on the heels of a lawsuit that challenges the requirement that mandatory counseling include the claim that abortion is linked to an increased risk of suicide (there is no reliable evidence to support this). In Casey, the Supreme Court allowed states to impose only a 24-hour waiting period and to require counseling that accurately explained the stages of fetal development. The South Dakota law is far out enough that when I asked Yoest about it, she said only, “That’s not one of our pieces of legislation.” If the battle reaches the Supreme Court, there’s presumably little chance that Justice Kennedy would sign off on requiring doctors to read a script of made-up data posing as facts.