Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the day the United States Supreme Court officially struck down Roe v Wade, a five-decade old legal precedent that theoretically protected abortion access nationwide on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy. In practice, it was already all but impossible to access abortion in some states and localities, but that situation has only gotten considerably worse since the high court’s ruling allowed Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass outright draconian bans.

Groups opposed to reproductive rights and groups advocating for those same rights both marked the day with a variety of events, with Republicans and Democrats both testing out a 2024 electoral strategy of painting the other side as “extreme” on the issue. Republicans, who are extreme in their desire to control women, queer people, and anyone who deviates from cishet white patriarchal Christian norms, repeated the same old lie about Democrats supporting abortion “right up to and after birth.”

Given that this line did not work for Republicans in the 2022 midterms, in which I correctly predicted that support for abortion rights would help Democrats, the fact Republicans continue to use it now would seem to indicate they see no other options, since Democrats will certainly not allow them to ignore the issue. Meanwhile, many Republicans are openly calling for a national abortion ban, something that will undoubtedly work against them in 2024.

As for the Democrats, they are sensibly going on the offensive, bolstered by polls showing Americans’ attitudes have shifted in favour of abortion rights – particularly in areas affected by bans. It is, frankly, a sad reflection on the American public that we had to lose the fundamental right to women’s bodily autonomy in order for many of us to begin to understand just how important that right is, but here we are.

Similarly, it is sad that the Democratic establishment itself seemed unaware of the very real threat the Christian right and the GOP posed to reproductive justice until the extreme right won a victory that was decades in the making.

Those Americans who, like me, grew up in the Christian right only to be horrified by its politics as adults understood perfectly well that they meant business in fighting to overturn Roe. The Democratic elite, however, grew complacent and consistently took a compromising posture toward an increasingly radical, anti-compromise Republican Party dominated by right-wing Christians.

As an electoral strategy, waiting to provide full-throated support for abortion as healthcare until polls showed clear support makes a certain amount of cautious sense for the Democrats. But I can’t help but think that if the leadership had truly understood before the Trump years that the right was willing and might be able to end abortion rights, they could have worked harder to craft pro-choice messaging that would have helped to educate the public about the issue’s importance, getting just enough in front of public opinion to bring Americans of good will along.

Now, we’re all hearing about the predictable, preventable, and horrifying ordeals many women face as they are turned away from hospitals in red states even as they are miscarrying unviable pregnancies and are likely to face serious health complications without undergoing a medically necessary abortion. Since Roe ended, at least one Texas woman developed sepsis as a result of such barbaric mistreatment.

In a fiery speech in Charlotte, North Carolina on Saturday, vice president Kamala Harris highlighted this and similar cases, linking the GOP’s abortion extremism not only to our country’s appalling maternal mortality rate – the highest among so-called “developed nations”, with significant racial disparities in outcomes – but also to other issues. She referenced voting access, same-sex marriage, and the frenzy of right-wing efforts to ban books and keep children from learning the truth about racism and slavery in American history.

I appreciated her highlighting the big picture with respect to Republicans’ authoritarian agenda, of which abortion bans are one key piece, along with her willingness to explicitly call Republicans’ extremists and to spell out the radicalism and danger of a Supreme Court willing to take away established rights. It’s good to see a national Democratic leader finally taking the gloves off when it comes to her dangerously authoritarian opposition party.

Conspicuously lacking in her speech, however, was any call to restore balance and fairness to the Supreme Court despite the clearly illegitimate way in which Republicans stacked it in order to turn it more or less into a partisan rubber-stamp for their agenda. It seems clear that raising this possibility is taboo for the Biden administration, and I can understand why cautious strategists would not want the president and vice president to take that risk ahead of 2024, when they are up for reelection.

But to call for the codification of Roe in legislation, which Harris and the Biden administration have been doing since Roe was overturned, seems rather impotent in light of the Supreme Court’s current composition and the fact that Republican abuse of the filibuster means it effectively takes 60 votes in the 100-seat senate to pass legislation –a threshold Democrats are highly unlikely to meet any time soon. The only realistic path to passing national legislation protecting abortion rights involves the Democratic Senate leadership abolishing the filibuster – but this is another option the Democratic establishment has refused to put on the table.

At this point, Democrats must, naturally, prioritise organising, campaigning, and fighting to hold the Senate and presidency and win back the House in 2024. Taking a strong stance in favour of abortion access is likely to help them with that goal; openly talking about ending the filibuster and addressing the fundamentally unfair and illegitimate nature of the current Supreme Court may not. And Biden himself may not even desire to do so, given his outmoded devotion to “unity” with Republicans. But if Biden does get a second term as president, I hope sustained public pressure to abolish the filibuster and rebalance the court will force his administration to address these concerns. If such pressure fails to materialise, all civil rights for marginalised groups will remain at risk.