“Something special is happening in Austin tonight,” @BarackObama tweeted late Tuesday, with the hashtag #StandWithWendy. That is Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator who, at that point, had been standing on the floor of the legislature for more than nine hours—talking about women’s bodies, their health, their lives—and would stand for about four more before Republicans, amid shouting and with brazenly dubious parliamentary tactics, forced an end to her filibuster. By then, though, she had won both a temporary and a long-term victory: a bill that would have left only five abortion clinics in the two hundred and sixty thousand square miles of Texas failed, even though Republicans first tried to pretend that it hadn’t. They’ll get another chance. But Davis reminded everyone that despite the steady dismantling of abortion rights in state legislatures, it’s possible to fight back. People might yell at you on the floor and for you from the rafters, and you might, if only for the moment, win.
Davis had started her filibuster at about 11 A.M. The anti-abortion-rights bill would have banned the procedure after twenty weeks and placed conditions on clinics—for equipment, for admitting privileges for doctors at hospitals within thirty miles—that would have made it impossible for them to stay open. The best guess, looking at a map, was that some women in Texas would end up driving over the Mexican border, and others might end up in some back room. But the bill had to pass by midnight, when the session ended. And so Davis set out to talk until the next day.
What did she talk about? What the bill really meant. What towns and the women who lived in them would lose; how a pregnancy unfolded—all points on which, she noted, her male colleagues seemed vague. “Lawmakers, either get out of the vagina business or go to medical school,” Davis said. Davis is fifty. She had a child when she was nineteen. She went to law school at Harvard. She wore a pale skirt and jacket. And in the hours she spoke she read the stories of people who had testified about the bill. According to the Texas Tribune’s live blog, at one point she cried, reading the testimony of one of the bill’s opponents, a woman who had needed to seek an abortion after twenty weeks because of unexpected medical complications. (“Instead of choosing an outfit for her to move home, I was picking out her burial gown.”)
Davis almost made it past midnight. She couldn’t sit down or take a break for the bathroom, and if she got help or went off-topic more than three times the filibuster would be over, too. That last was tricky, not because her plan had been to read the Federalist Papers or every volume of Harry Potter out loud but because at about 10 P.M. the Republicans controlling the state senate tried to claim that her mentions of the Planned Parenthood budget and an earlier bill requiring sonograms before abortions were somehow not “germane,” and that that and a colleague helping her with a back brace meant that she was done. Her Democratic colleagues disagreed, loudly. What followed has been widely described as chaos—a “ruckus,” the Republican Lieutenant General David Dewhurst said, caused by “an unruly mob.” Davis kept standing, in pink-and-lime sneakers.
And by then, people across the country kept watching. The President himself wasn’t tweeting about Davis, exactly—@BarackObama is the account of Organizing for Action, which works for his agenda (and for whom he does sign tweets). But there were enough eyes on Texas that what the Republicans tried to do next—passing the bill after midnight, without making it clear what measure was being voted on, and then claiming that the vote had gone through before time was up—didn’t work. And Wendy Davis won.
