Yet in the past six months, social conservatives have widened their offensive, and their new target is clear: Not satisfied with making it harder to obtain legal abortions, they want to limit access to birth control, too.

"Contraception is under attack in a way it really wasn't in the past few years," says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center. "In 2004, we could not find any group—the National Right to Life Committee, the Bush campaign, anyone—that would go on the record to say they're opposed to birth control," adds Elizabeth Shipp, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America. "We couldn't find them in 2006 either, and in 2008 it was just fringe groups. In 2010, 2011, and this year, it's just exploded."

Even previously uncontroversial ideas about contraception are now being questioned. As I explained in this story about Obama's birth-control policy, most of the administration's recently-issued rule requiring companies to provide birth control to their employees has been widely accepted federal law for a decade. Requiring employers to provide birth control if they provide other preventative services was so uncontroversial that most employers—even Catholic universities like DePaul, in Chicago—simply changed their policies and offered birth control to avoid being sued. The percentage of employers offering birth control coverage tripled in a decade. The national controversy only erupted after Obama issued the new rule in January.