Abortion rights supporters gather outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix on April 17.

Here are a few things that happened in the United States in 1864: President Abraham Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant to command all Union military forces; Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel "The Scarlet Letter" describes a woman's ordeal following an unplanned pregnancy, died at age 59; and Arizona passed a law outlawing abortion except to save the life of the mother.

Nit-pickers might say the paragraph above should note that the abortion law's passage didn't happen in the United States, since Arizona was still part of the New Mexico Territory and wouldn't gain statehood for another five decades. But you get the point.

In a case of legal originalism that might make even the solons of the Federalist Society blanch, modern-day Arizona's Supreme Court earlier this month issued a ruling that tossed out an injunction that had shielded the public from the 1864 law. The decision swept aside the state's already-restrictive ban on abortions 15 weeks or more after conception, and — though the decision is maddeningly vague on key details — suggests that doctors who perform the procedure outside the strict scope of the law, or anyone who assists in that endeavor, could within a few weeks be eligible for prosecution, with prison terms running "not less than two years nor more than five years."

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Welcome to the United States under the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Dodd decision, which threw out Roe v. Wade and returned the question of whether abortion should be legal to the states — an outcome long sought by anti-abortion activists and politicians such as former President Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about how his nominees to the nation's highest court made it possible.

Like the dog who has sunk his teeth into the wheel of the speeding car he has been chasing, Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans nationwide are living with the consequences of their political decisions on abortion. Kari Lake, the noted conspiracist and Trump superfan running for U.S. Senate, has dumped her former support for the Civil War-era law and is now calling on the state Legislature to repeal it — something that the GOP majority in the state Senate has so far been unwilling to do, despite GOP defections in the other chamber. Anti-abortion true believers are now irate at Mr. Trump and Ms. Lake for alleged flip-flopping (they should have known whom they were dealing with), and even voters who believe in limiting the right to abortion are recoiling from a law that requires a victim of rape or incest to carry her abuser's child to term.

If you think New Yorkers don't have a dog — the car-chasing kind or otherwise — in this fight, think again. A politician who would flip once on this issue will do so repeatedly if the polls point that way. If Republicans are once again given control of Congress and the White House, there's nothing to stop them from imposing a federal abortion ban at some arbitrary point in gestation, a change they could pitch as less extreme than the 1864 law.

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In Arizona and the rest of the nation, it's a reminder at what's at stake at the ballot box, and not just this November.