When do politicians mobilize for the rule of law? A key challenge for resilience to democratic backsliding is that citizens often perceive threats to democracy and the rule of law, such as the erosion of judicial independence, as abstract and distant. We argue that rulings on highly politicized issues provide politicians with opportunities to mobilize opposition and generate public backlash. This paper examines Polish politicians’ reactions to a ruling by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in 2020, which effectively imposed an almost complete abortion ban. Relying on an original dataset of more than 5,000 rule-of-law-related tweets by Polish MPs between December 2018 and December 2022, we employ a difference-in-differences design to analyze how male and female politicians engaged with the rule of law before and after the ruling. We find evidence for long-lasting and strongly gendered reaction patterns to the abortion ruling. Female opposition MPs, in particular, engaged extensively with rule-of-law-related issues following the decision, more so than male opposition MPs. Contrasting our findings with reactions to other significant court rulings before and after the Tribunal’s abortion ban, we find that female opposition MPs persistently showed greater engagement with the rule of law in general, even beyond abortion-related matters. The results highlight the importance of linking abstract threats to judicial independence to concrete, salient issues that resonate with citizens.