"She's a total fighter," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards. "And the thing about Sen. Davis, she says she's going to do something, she gets it done."
The daughter of a single mom, Davis, 50, overcame her own hardships as a divorced teenage mother to graduate with honors from Harvard Law School.
At 19, Davis decided to become the first member of her family to go to college after hearing of a two-year paralegal program from a co-workers.
At the time, she was in a trailer park and raising her daughter by herself. "We were the working poor," she told The New York Times.
Davis clerked for a federal judge, practiced law and was CEO of a title company before getting into politics with her election to the Fort Worth City Council in 1999.
After unseating a longtime Republican incumbent in 2008 for state senator from Fort Worth, Davis, a Democrat, was named "Rookie of the Year" by Texas Monthlymagazine and was re-elected in 2012.
ABORTION LIMITS: Texas bill misses deadline
On Tuesday night, Davis' 10-hour filibuster of an abortion regulation bill came to an end when the chairman ruled she had gone off topic. Fifteen minutes before midnight, the Senate chamber's packed gallery erupted in raucous shouting, disrupting the proceedings and effectively killing the bill when the midnight deadline for passage came and went.
"I'm rising on the floor today to humbly give voice to thousands of Texans who are being ignored," she said when her speech began, later adding: "These voices have been silenced by a governor who made blind partisanship and personal political ambition the priority of our state."
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