Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

Republican politicians, including Gov. Sununu, are suffering from “Be careful what you wish for” syndrome. They have been flip-flopping like stranded carp since their Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has, as designed, led to abortion bans in state after state.

They support a national ban, then they don’t. They support some exceptions, then they don’t. They were happy to “let the states decide,” but now they see the terrible ramifications and inevitable political backlash, and they’re just gasping for air. Many people truly believe abortion is wrong, and they are free to practice that belief, but for cynical politicians, this has just been about winning elections.

While race and immigration are centuries-old hot-button issues, used to inflame fears and passions for political gain, it took the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to discover the power of abortion politics. According to Reuters, the General Social Survey taken in 1977 found that 39% of Republicans thought abortions should be allowed for any reason, and 35% of Democrats. Abortion wasn’t about politics, but about deeply personal moral, ethical, and medical decisions.

In Roe v. Wade, the Court had agreed. It didn’t base its decision on opinions about when life begins. People have always had deeply held and often conflicting beliefs about this, most based on religious texts and teachings. But there was, and is, no scientific or even theological consensus resolving those conflicts. The Court therefore used Constitutional texts and principles to conclude that the 4th and 14th Amendments guarantee a “reasonable right to privacy” and “equal protection of the laws” and grant individuals, not government, the right to follow the dictates of their own hearts, minds, and medical advisors.

Since then, abortion has been a winning “wedge issue,” one that divides or causes conflict within an otherwise unified group. Lee Atwater popularized the term as part of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign, arguing that Republicans should “drive a wedge” between the national Democratic Party and traditional Southern Democrats, the powerful “Dixiecrats.”

Jerry Falwell, Southern Baptist minister, founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to rally Southern evangelical voters behind Ronald Reagan. They grouped the Roe v. Wade decision with other culture war issues like racial integration, LGBTQ+ rights, and women working outside of the home as examples of moral degeneracy undermining “traditional values.” They even invented a traditional family — nuclear, suburban, patriarchal (only a norm after World War II) — to defend against political liberalism. (“The Way We Never Were,” By Stephanie Coontz). The strategy worked well for Reagan.

The GOP adopted the language, if not the spirit, of American patriotism and Christian values, combined with ghastly conspiracy theories about everything from organ harvesting to satanic rituals, to divide and conquer. In the last 30 years, they have captured state legislatures and executive offices, as well as the U.S. Congress. For a term, long enough to install three Supreme Court justices, they had the White House, too. For generations, the Supreme Court ruled in case after case that states may not infringe on Constitutional rights. In a single decade, our current Court has undone much of that progress.

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It’s not too late for us in New Hampshire to learn from other states how dangerous abortion bans are and make better decisions. We know state bans are increasing maternal mortality rates, which are already higher in the U.S. than any other wealthy nation. OBGYN practitioners are fleeing Arizona, Idaho, and most Southern states because vague, uninformed, and onerous laws threaten both their livelihoods and the lives of their patients. New Hampshire already struggles with a dangerous shortage of healthcare providers.

The hypocrisy is strong among GOP legislators. The same men outraged about the tyranny of polio and measles vaccines support state control of women’s reproductive decisions. A 15-week ban is still making its way through the legislature but it’s the proposed 15-day (not a misprint!) ban that’s a real education about where Republicans want to take us, as well as their profound ignorance about how pregnancy even works. Just how would the state enforce a 15-day ban? One hesitates to imagine.

In introducing the bill, Rep. John Sellers of Bristol, patronized, “…[it] is more to protect the baby, but also to protect the women, too, and not just be a free-for-all.” Women evidently both need to be protected by these geniuses and are sure to run amok like barbarians without severe restrictions. This is the kind of logic it takes to defend all forms of subjugation.

The once Grand Old Party has become host to anti-democracy extremists, as a healthy cell might host a destructive virus. We can hope it will soon see that denying women the right to bodily autonomy is both a losing strategy and terrible for the country, but since our rights truly are up to the states for now, voters need to mobilize. This means support bills now that ensure reproductive freedom and oppose those that would deny it. And it means electing competent leaders in November who truly believe that “Live Free” applies to women, too.