âThese are the kinds of decisions we are going to have to live with,â a blunt Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, warned his caucus later as it weighed whether to make historic changes to Senate rules. Those changes would break a Republican filibuster of President Obamaâs nominees and end the minority partyâs ability to block a presidentâs choices to executive branch posts and federal courts except the Supreme Court.  The moment represented a turning point in what had been, until then, a cautious approach by Democrats to push back against Republicans who were preventing the White House from appointing liberal judges. All the more glaring, Democrats believed, was that they had allowed confirmation of the conservative judges now ruling in the abortion cases. Republicans were blocking any more appointments to the court of appeals in Washington, which issued the contraception decision.  Faced with the possibility that they might never be able to seat judges that they hoped would act as a counterweight to more conservative appointees confirmed when George W. Bush was president, all but three of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic caucus sided with Mr. Reid. The decision represented a recognition by Democrats that they had to risk a backlash in the Senate to head off what they saw as a far greater long-term threat to their priorities in the form of a judiciary tilted to the right.  âThe final tipping point was this month, when the minority launched a campaign to block President Obama from appointing anyone, regardless of experience and character, to three vacancies on the D.C. circuit court,â said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon and one of the leading proponents of filibuster limits. âThis constituted an attack on the balance and integrity of our courts.â  The question of the composition of the federal judiciary has become even more pressing for liberals, given the battery of abortion rights cases now making their way through the courts. From Texas to South Dakota to Wisconsin, federal courts across the country â many of them with vacancies that the president will now be able to fill â are seeing their dockets grow with challenges to restrictive new anti-abortion laws.  Very quickly and unexpectedly, abortion and contraceptive rights became the decisive factor in the filibuster fight. First there were the two coincidentally timed decisions out of Texas and Washington. Then momentum to change the rules reached a critical mass when Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and a defender of abortion rights, decided to put aside her misgivings, in large part because the recent court action was so alarming to her, Democrats said.  Mr. Reid and many members of his caucus found it especially disquieting that in 2005 they agreed to confirm the two judges who wrote the recent decisions â Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Priscilla R. Owen of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit â as part of a deal with Senate Republicans, who controlled the chamber at the time and were threatening to limit Democratsâ ability to filibuster judges if some of Mr. Bushâs nominees were not approved.  Conservatives have always viewed the federal courts as a last line of defense in the countryâs cultural and political fights. Among their base it is a central tenet that electing Republican presidents is vital precisely because they appoint right-leaning judges who will keep perceived liberal overreach in check.  The issue has never been as powerful for liberals. Consider, for example, how often Republican candidates laud Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas compared with how relatively rarely Democrats mention liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  âRepublicans and conservatives have been better about the base understanding the significance of judicial nominations than the groups left of center,â said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which fights for conservative causes in the courts.  Partly for that reason, conservatives say Republicans will not be afraid to force their preferred judges through the Senate should it and the White House flip back to Republican control. âThere was this rule in place, and itâd been in place for a long time to prevent the kind of thing youâre going to see now, which is attempted court packing,â Mr. Sekulow said. âRepublicans wonât be afraid to return the favor.â  In the case before the Washington appeals court, Judge Brown issued an opinion siding with Freshway Foods, a produce company that opposes contraception and abortion so strongly that some of its delivery trucks have been emblazoned with signs declaring, âItâs not a choice, itâs a child.â In the opinion, she likened the governmentâs requirement that the company cover birth control for its employees to affirming âa repugnant beliefâ and wrote that the company would be forced to be âcomplicit in a grave moral wrong.â  In the Texas case, which is still in its early stages and set to be argued in January, Judge Owen agreed that the state had a legitimate public health reason for requiring that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and rejected the claim by Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas and other plaintiffs that the state was placing too high a burden on women who want the procedure. Because many abortion doctors do not have admitting privileges, clinics across the state have shut down since the courtâs ruling.  A case challenging a similar law in Wisconsin will go before the federal appeals circuit court in Chicago next week, and other cases challenge admitting privileges laws in Mississippi and Alabama.  Because these cases continue to move through the courts â and because anti-abortion activists elsewhere are trying to make states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia the next legal battlegrounds over abortion â Democratsâ focus on judges is expected to intensify.  âThe courts are critically important backstops for the protection of womenâs health and the ability of women to access abortion,â said Jennifer Dalven, director of the reproductive freedom project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is fighting legal battles in several states. âBut what we saw in Texas reminds us that we cannot be complacent and feel sure that the courts will be there to correct everything. We must stop these laws before they pass.â
Two federal court decisions limiting abortion and contraception became a decisive factor in persuading Democrats to sharply curb the use of filibusters.