The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.

Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.

“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”

Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.