Protests sweep across nation as supreme court overturns Roe v Wade – follow live

The short version of how Americans lost their right to terminate a pregnancy might be summed up in one name: Trump.

The real estate tycoon and reality-TV star first shocked the world by winning the US presidency, then rewarded his base by confirming three supreme court justices to a nine-member bench, thus rebalancing the court to lean conservative for a generation to come.

That short road led to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an opinion released this week in which supreme court justices voted to overturn the landmark case Roe v Wade, which in 1973 granted a constitutional right to abortion.

The end of federal protection for abortion is expected to lead to 26 states banning the procedure immediately or as soon as practicable, affecting tens of millions of US women and people who can become pregnant.

The decision comes even though about 85% of Americans favor legal abortion in at least some circumstances. Why, and how, a decision opposed by a majority of Americans came about has everything to do with political power, experts said.

The anti-abortion movement is “the best organized faction in American politics”, said Frederick Clarkson, an expert on the Christian right and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associate, a progressive thinktank in Massachusetts.

“They understand they’re a minority of the population, of the electorate, and certainly a minority set of views on reproductive rights issues,” he said. “But because they know that, they’ve found effective ways of maximizing their political clout by being better organized than numerically greater factions who are less well organized.”

Put another way, he said, the anti-abortion movement “mastered the tools of democracy to achieve undemocratic outcomes”.

The currents that led to the Dobbs decision are among the most powerful in American politics today. Over decades, a religious movement prevailed by harnessing the forces of polarization, the erosion of constitutional norms and the manipulation of US democracy, scholars said.

“It’s not like we’ve had this slow erosion of abortion rights,” said Neil Siegel, an expert in constitutional law and professor at Duke University who clerked for former liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Instead, justices issued an opinion that “is utterly dismissive of what has been constitutional law for literally five decades”, and was “repeatedly affirmed by justices appointed by both parties”.

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Related: How Americans lost their right to abortions: a victory for conservatives, 50 years in the making