Back then Wendy Davis was barely known in her own state, by the end of the day she was one of the most famous politicians in the country. Davis rose just after 11 am and stayed on her feet until after midnight. As she spoke news of her stand snowballed. A crowd formed at the Capitol building, with supporters queuing for hours to spend a few minutes in the gallery to watch her speak.

State and then national media took up the story. Time and again Republicans sought to silence her claiming she had broken strict procedural rules governing filibusters – speakers may not rest, eat or drink, may not lean on the bench in front of them, may not veer off topic.

The crowds in the gallery in the Capitol building's corridors chanted "Let her speak, let her speak" at these attempts and followers on social media erupted furiously.

Sometime that night Barack Obama tweeted, "There is something very special happening in Texas tonight."

At midnight a colleague stood beside her and raised her hand in victory and pandemonium broke out. The bill known as HB2 would not be voted on that night.

At a 1am press conference with her supporters still cheering around her Davis told reporters, "I'm pleased to know that a spotlight is shining on Texas, a spotlight is shining on the failure of our current leadership."

Even though it was clear that the staunchly anti-abortion governor Rick Perry would soon see that bill was voted on, Hollywood could not have scripted the day better.

This was in stark contrast to how the law quietly came into effect, like a bolt from the blue, last Friday evening.

Dr Bernard Rosenfeld was at his Houston Women's Clinic preparing for the following day. Saturdays are busy at the clinic because most of the patients he treats are poor single women who can't easily take time off work.

He received a call from an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer telling him he had to close his clinic. He presumed he would have some time to wind down – and to treat the women on his books - but he was stunned to learn he had to close his doors immediately.

"The court didn't say this is going to happen in a month, they didn't give any notice, it was illogical. It was crazy."

He and a couple of staff members hit the phones, calling the 45 patients they were due to see the following day for procedures.

The women, he says, were devastated. What made the calls harder for him was that he had no hope to offer them, nowhere else he could refer them.

"These were people trying to do the right thing, trying to be responsible," he says. Most of them had another child at home and were on low paying jobs. The same conservative movement that had effectively abolished abortion in Texas that night had already ended or curtailed food stamps, welfare payments, pre-school care and even cut funding for birth control.

"They don't care so much about the children once they are born," says Rosenfeld.

"The hypocrisy is significant."

What happened in Texas is emblematic of legal fights over abortion being waged around the country. While the Supreme Court's decision in Roe V Wade 41 years ago enshrined the right to an abortion, opponents of the practice have never stopped challenging it state by state, seeking either to whittle away access or ban it outright. In 2010 the Republican campaign against Obamacare was at in full swing and the Tea Party movement at the height of its powers. In the mid-term elections in November that year thousands of Tea Party candidates were elected into city, state and federal office across the country. As a result, the campaign against abortion, and even against contraception, has intensified. Texas is the current epicentre of this effort, and the pro-life side is stacking up significant victories.

After Davis' successful filibuster, Perry simply called a new session in the state senate and HB2 passed easily.

To understand how the law works, it helps to look back to another Supreme Court decision, Casey v Planned Parenthood, which was heard back in 1992. In that decision, the court re-affirmed the right to abortion but with the caveat that states had the right to regulate it, so long as the regulations they introduced did not present an "undue burden" on women seeking access to the procedure.

Since then pro-life groups have worked with conservative legislatures to test the boundaries – seeing how far they can go with regulations that restrict access, without a court finding they had crossed that "undue burden" line.

Pro-life groups have been enthusiastic and creative in drafting new restrictions, and in spreading them from state to state when they find success. Americans United for Life, the legislative wing of the pro-life movement, has advanced laws in 37 states that make it compulsory for minors to get parental consent. In 11 states, Republicans have made these laws harder to circumvent by forcing young women to go before a judge it they want to get around the law. In a recent article for Mother Jones magazine, Molly Redden described how in cases she had reviewed, judges had refused authorisation for various arbitrary reasons – citing one case in which a girl could not get access because she had not consulted her priest.

Three judges denied petitions because becoming pregnant by accident indicated a young woman was too immature to choose abortion, Redden writes.

In 2012, the then governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, sought to make it compulsory for women to view their foetuses via an ultrasound before they could get access to abortion. In the early weeks of pregnancy this would have necessitated women having a wand-like device inserted into the vagina. McDonnell backed down before legal advice suggesting forcing such a procedure without medical necessity veered close to rape.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organisation that studies reproductive health, between 2011 and 2013 states introduced 205 laws restricting abortion, more than the 189 that had been introduced over the previous decade.

The HB2 laws have proved to be among the most successful the pro-life lobby has come up with.

The law focuses on abortion clinics and doctors rather than their patients. It bans abortion after 20 weeks, demands that doctors have admitting privileges to hospitals within 48 kilometres of clinics – which is not possible in much of Texas – and  requires clinics to set themselves up as "ambulatory surgical centres". Such centres are essentially mini-hospitals, and are built to hospital standards.

To meet the regulation Rosenfeld would have had to spend $3 million on unnecessary facilities.

After the law was introduced, it was immediately appealed by a coalition of women's rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. Most providers, including Rosenfeld, believed the laws were so transparently designed to curtail abortion rather than improve patient safety that they would be overturned or diluted.

Instead, last Friday afternoon, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, one of the most conservative in the US, announced out the blue it would not hear the appeal. The laws came into effect immediately. That evening, the number of abortion clinics in Texas dropped from more than 40 to seven; another has closed since then.

According to a Guttmacher policy report on Texas, more than 2.4 million women in Texas now have no access to health insurance and more Texan women are in need of family planning than anywhere else in the country except Arizona.

"The response of Texas' elected leaders in terms of policies and programs that could alleviate these conditions, meanwhile, has ranged from apathy to outright hostility," wrote Guttmacher's Kinsey Hasstedt earlier this year.

"As for reproductive health and rights, Perry and his allies have intensified their attacks on programs, policies and providers since 2010, while Texas women seeking reproductive healthcare are left to navigate one of the most restrictive environments in the country."

It notes that access to abortion has effectively ceased to exist in poor and rural areas of the nation's second biggest state.

According to an analysis by the health news website HR Reality Check, a woman in the state's poorer south-west will typically now have to pay more than a month's wages and travel seven hours round trip in order to access abortion services. Abortion clinics remain open only  in the cities of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and Austin.

During the appeal against the new laws, a lawyer for the Centre for Reproductive Rights argued that the changes would leave the impoverished Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border, without any access to abortion and that women in the region would have to make a 480-kilometre round trip.

Judge Edith Jones was unmoved. "Do you know how long that takes in Texas at 75 miles [120km] an hour?" she said. "This is a peculiarly flat and not congested highway."

If Perry, who is thought to be positioning himself for a 2016 run at the White House, is concerned about criticism his laws are designed not to further women's health but to access abortion, it does not show.

Indeed he seems proud of his record.

"To be clear, my goal, and the goal of many of those joining me here today, is to make abortion, at any stage, a thing of the past," he said at a Texas Right to Life press conference last year.

Davis translated her new profile into a bid to replace Perry who is retiring at the mid-term elections. Polls suggest she doesn't have a chance.

According to Dawn Johnsen, a professor of law at Indiana University who has specialised in reproductive rights and the constitution, the assault on access to abortion has now become so significant that the Supreme Court will not be able to ignore it for much longer.

"Some time in the next year or two it is going to have to hear one of these cases," she says.

If that happens before the next presidential election, the court would likely split, with four conservative justices opposing rights to abortion, and four supporting, with the unpredictable Justice Anthony Kennedy deciding the matter for the nation.

Should the court hold off a little longer, the next president of the US could well have the final say in his – or her – selection of the Supreme Court Justice.

Either way Rosenfeld, now in his early 70s, has had enough. He will keep his gynaecology and obstetrics practice open, but even if the laws change he won't reopen his abortion clinic, though he is sure he provided a good service to the women who needed it most over many years. And he can't imagine many of the younger doctors coming up behind him will be willing to take on the fight.