AUL doesn’t engage much in these splashy guerrilla tactics. Instead, it focuses on a quiet legislative strategy that, though it garners less attention, might be far more effective at actually limiting abortions.

The group has scored its legal checkmates by breaking ranks with the other, more idealistic branch of the pro-life movement—the one that aims to end abortion entirely. This more absolutist flank has faltered, since the majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances, even if they disagree with the practice on moral grounds. (For example, two so-called “personhood” initiatives, which would have established that human life begins at conception, failed last fall at the polls.) The AUL, meanwhile, pursues a more pragmatic “incrementalist” strategy, in which pro-lifers chip away at the total number of abortions by helping to enact new constraints.

And they are virtuosos at that: According to the Guttmacher Institute, so far this year states have enacted 51 new abortion restrictions, bringing the total passed since 2010 to 282. Many of these laws originated in Defending Life, a compendium of about 50 pieces of legislation written by AUL and its nine staff lawyers. According to the “legislative victories” sections of the group’s annual reports, the group has helped enact 38 pro-life laws in various states since 2013.

A Look at AUL-Inspired Abortion Measures (Key)

Click here for a map key

Thanks to AUL, Arizona doctors are now required to tell women who undergo chemical abortions that the procedure can be reversed midway through if the woman changes her mind. Some pro-life doctors claim to have executed this procedure successfully, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it is not safe or even routinely possible. AUL included the measure in Defending Life, and even though the gynecologists’ group lobbied against the measure this spring, it passed into law.

Also this year, Arkansas enacted HB 1578, based on AUL’s “Women’s Right to Know Act,” which requires that doctors who perform abortions describe to women “the probable anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child at the time the abortion is to be performed.” The law also includes AUL-suggested language instructing doctors to tell women that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation—even though ACOG says it’s unlikely pain is felt before 29 weeks. (Arkansas’ law also includes the chemical-abortion reversal provision.)

After the Supreme Court upheld the Obamacare tax credits for middle-income Americans last month, AUL launched its call for abortion coverage to be excluded from plans purchased through the Obamacare exchanges.

The group is also behind laws, passed in a number of states, that require abortion providers to gain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and mandate that abortion clinics meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. Pro-choice advocates say these laws have forced the shuttering of abortion clinics, not only because the building upgrades are prohibitively expensive, but also because some hospitals will not grant admitting privileges to abortion providers. Opponents of these restrictions argue that the rules have become unduly onerous in Texas, where they were enacted with AUL’s help in 2013. Texas abortion providers are trying to bring the matter before the Supreme Court. There are now just 18 abortion clinics in Texas, compared with 41 in 2012.