In The New York Times today, Robin Toner says of the anti-abortion movement,

Its legislative goals are incremental, careful and popular with Americans who would oppose an outright ban on abortion.

Robin Toner, I think you and Katha Pollitt need to talk:

Did you know that since January 1, women in Texas have not been able to obtain abortions from the sixteenth week of pregnancy on? ...In theory, all that has changed is a bureaucratic regulation included in a bundle of antiabortion legislation, HB15. Most of the provisions in HB15, which sailed through the Republican-dominated state legislature, are familiar: There's a twenty-four-hour waiting period and a requirement that clinics offer a flower-decorated pamphlet called A Woman's Right to Know, which suggests a link between abortion and breast cancer, stresses the possibility of psychological damage and gives the death rate for abortions performed at various stages of pregnancy. The bill also requires providers to photocopy patients' IDs and keep them on file.

The killer provision, though, is the one that has received the least press coverage: Beginning with the sixteenth week of pregnancy, abortions can no longer take place in clinics--they must now be performed in a hospital or an ambulatory surgical center. The catch is, Texas hospitals, many of which are Catholic, do almost no abortions, and of the state's 273 surgicenters not one performs the procedure or plans to take it on. For a clinic to qualify as a surgical center it would have to meet hundreds of architectural specifications at a cost of well over a million dollars....

...many clinics have stopped doing abortions after fourteen weeks just to be on the safe side.... "Anyone I refer is at least eight hours away from an out-of-state clinic. It's a real burden on them. The majority don't make the trip--it's too expensive." Even if the two clinics now considering an upgrade manage to pull it off, the state is so huge that most women will be left in the cold.

To Toner, I guess because this didn't happen in Washington, it doesn't exist.