MISSISSIPPI’S sole remaining abortion clinic is a small single-storey sandstone building on a street corner in the state’s capital. The Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (above) appears unremarkable, until you notice the reflective glass in all the doors and windows, the multiple security cameras and the thick black plastic draped over the wrought-iron fence to shield clients from protesters, who have kept vigil daily for decades.

Their vigil may soon end. On July 1st a law went into effect requiring abortionists who work in Mississippi to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Privileges can be denied for any reason, and so far no Jackson hospital has granted them to any of the clinic’s doctors. Supporters claim that the law is a simple health-and-safety measure, but occasionally the masks slip. After the law passed, Bubba Carpenter, a state representative, boasted: “We stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi.” Phil Bryant, the governor, said as he signed the law: “If it closes that clinic, so be it.”

Making a state “abortion-free”, as Mr Bryant says he wants Mississippi to be, has long been a goal of anti-abortion activists. Since 1973, when the Supreme Court held, tendentiously, in Roe v Wade that a “right of privacy” allows a woman to abort her fetus before it is viable, anti-abortion activists have tried and failed to have that decision overturned. Before it, states regulated abortion as they saw fit; since then state-level abortion bans have been tried and failed, thanks to the constitution’s supremacy clause, which holds that when state and federal law conflict, federal law wins. Activists have also tried to get “personhood” measures—defining life as beginning at fertilisation—on to the ballots of several states in recent election cycles.

A more successful strategy, however, is to shut down abortion clinics by piling on regulations. Abortion-rights activists call such provisions “TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws”, and argue that they have little to do with health or safety—it is difficult to see how having wider hallways in Virginia’s clinics would decrease complications, for instance—but instead aim to make running an abortion clinic impossible in practice.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy group, in 2011 state legislatures enacted 92 provisions restricting access to abortion services—nearly three times the previous record of 34, in 2005. That trend has continued this year. The proposed restrictions take a variety of forms. Six states have enacted laws allocating funding for services designed to discourage women from having abortions. Three states have banned all abortions after 20 weeks. Four states have banned the health exchanges to be created under Obamacare from financing abortions. Three states have banned doctors from prescribing abortifacient medicine remotely, as is often done in rural areas; such prescriptions now account for roughly one in five non-hospital abortions in America. Last year, Virginia enacted a law requiring abortion clinics to meet the same building, parking and record-keeping requirements as hospitals.