Slate -- Abortion Contortions - Arizona is funding a poor woman's right to choose. Texas could be next. By Emily Bazelon

Groups like the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy have brought 21 suits like the one in Arizona, and they've won 15 of them. As a result, states quietly spend millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for tens of thousands of abortions that are recommended by doctors when there's a risk to a woman's physical or mental health.

Why so many pro-choice rulings? And why have there been such successes in traditionally conservative states like Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, New Mexico, Texas, and West Virginia—as well as in more liberal California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Vermont? For one thing, the pro-choice litigators deliberately choose to file suits in state courts that aren't afraid to interpret their own state constitutions in ways that differ from the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings on the federal one. And they seek out state constitutions that offer stronger protections for women's rights than the federal Constitution does. In New Mexico and Texas, for instance, the hook for a pro-choice victory was a state Equal Rights Amendment.

Texas was the only state where there was a loud conservative outcry against the case, probably why the political Texas Supreme Court did not rule before the election.