Only a fool would wade into the now hysterical and furious debate over abortion and women’s rights to make the most personal decisions about their bodies and lives.

I could hardly wait.

I should say that no man can fully appreciate the fear, anger, and cruelty that the Supreme Court’s upcoming overruling of Roe vs. Wade evokes in women.

As a man, I am eager to support my wife, daughter, and female friends and women’s rights in any way I can.

But I also know that just as this affects women in a way I can’t feel or see, only women can stop or reverse it. Men can help.

Speaking only for me, I had always thought Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the most sense when she talked about the importance of the abortion issue:

“It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she is the decisionmaker. Her choice is controlling,” Ginsburg told Senators during her four days of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you impose restraints that impede her choice, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex.”

Ginsburg also believed that Roe V. Wade was unintentionally divisive and kept Americans from debating this issue and working it out themselves.

I respect the depth of many honest people’s opposition to unrestricted abortion, which they see as taking a helpless and voiceless life. Everyone who opposes abortion is not a monster or enemy of women.

But they can pass all the legislation they want; they will never stop or silence the millions of women in America who believe this issue is about their freedom, not their reproductivity.

Some perspective.

First off, this news is not a final court opinion but a draft. No one knows who leaked it or why.

There is little doubt that the Supreme Court, now essentially (but not entirely) a Republican Party legislative and policy arm, will restrict or overturn Roe Vs. Wade.

How and when is not yet clear.

But the political implications are already enormous.

For one thing, the Democratic Party now has something it has desperately been searching for – an issue that will drive millions of women to the polls in November. This has upended everyone’s expectations of what might happen then.

All bets are off.

For another, this issue moves to the states and away from the stalemated national government.

More than 60 percent of Americans say they oppose abolishing Roe V. Wade. That is at least three times the number of American voters who support Donald Trump and his authoritarian and Christian nationalist movement.

The Supreme Court is much more vulnerable than the ideologues might have us believe.

They have no police or enforcement arm, they operate on trust and tradition, and the more they violate both, the more they weaken the court. States like California, Illinois, and New York – with their enormous urban populations – will never accept a total ban on abortion in their cities.

As more and more women find ways to seek abortions, the court’s authority will be further eroded. As the Russian Army is learning every day, technology and the Internet have altered politics as well as war.

Power is diversifying.

The court can restrict and even ban abortion in at least 24 states, but they cannot ever ban it entirely in so diverse and polarized a country and in the face of vigorous opposition.

Women’s groups have been mobilizing for months to raise money to help poor and black women – the ones most immediately affected if Roe V. Wade is overruled –  travel to get abortions.

They also distribute hundreds of thousands of abortion pills and other simple devices for aborting fetuses; these are available worldwide and on the Internet and in many pharmacies in Democratic states.

Texas would need an Army to stop it all.

Donald Trump’s fatal and continuing mistake has been to ignore the very dynamic and intensely growing power of women in American life, as well as ordinary citizens sick of conflict and paralysis.

I see women as the most potent political force in America and growing more powerful every day.

Stacey Abrams is the future, along with the Portland Moms, not Trump or Mitch McConnell or the wannabe governors.

Abortion is not something that the primarily male Christians – and many women who oppose it – can ever abolish.

The extremist Republicans taking office all over the country replicate Donald  Trump at his most powerful and his worst.

He could easily have won re-election if he moderated his most extreme and disturbing policies. He couldn’t, and he lost because he awakened a mighty army of women and others all over the country to rise and oppose him.

These voters have not gone away. They are still with us, even if disenchanted.

The Republicans pushing their culture wars, fighting vaccines, and moving to curb abortion and voting rights are following Trump’s dumb and self-destructive footprints; they are awakening a sleeping army that was not expected to participate in the November elections.

Many shocked Americans are now awakening to the idea that the Republican Party and its governing policy echo Vladimir Putin more and more, not Thomas Jefferson or John Adams.

First, the Republicans fought to give corporations the rights of individual citizens. Now that they are using those rights, they are fighting to silence and punish them for speaking freely.

Perhaps the most crucial effect of the expected court ruling on Roe is that the focus of American politics now shifts to the states and away from Washington.

The movement to ban abortions began organizing locally a half-century ago, electing governors and state legislators who worked long and hard to elect legislators who have relentlessly worked to restrict abortion rights.

The supporters of abortion rights did not keep up. They outworked and outfought and out-planned their opponents.

It’s striking to me that even though nearly two-thirds of all Americans oppose overturning Roe V. Wade, 24 states have elected representatives who support banning abortion altogether.

Although the Supreme Court is taking the lead and the heat, this is a grassroots revolution, part of rural and white America’s revolt against feminism, non-Christians, diversity, immigration, and gay rights. This movement rejects the idea that women have the right to control their bodies.

I do not believe women, in general, will give up this right or can be bullied or threatened into letting white Christian straight men tell them when to have children.

That is folly.

The Democrats abandoned rural America decades ago and still pretend to be stunned by the cultural and political civil war between rural and urban America.

The ignored citizens of the South have a point – the elitists and economists, and politicians of the Democrat Party have abandoned them. They are in full revolt against our system; it hasn’t worked for them.

America is drifting towards minority rule because many in the majority only rarely vote. In a Democracy, that is perhaps the greatest danger to all kinds of freedoms once taken for granted.

The Republican Party has become a white, straight, Christian nationalist movement, increasingly extreme, bold, and intolerant. That’s been a complicated reality for many Americans to accept.

I believe they are overreaching.

I’m struck by the cruelest and most heartless element of the anti-abortion legislation in the Republican states: dropping the exceptions for women who are the victims of rape and incest.

I can’t imagine anything crueler than forcing women to carry and give birth to children conceived in rape and incest.

That adds so much more pain and suffering to horrific brutality.

When the first young women lose their lives desperately seeking an abortion in the wrong way, the  anti-abortion movement will regret the way they did this.

Until recently, those exceptions were standard in anti-abortion legislation. Now, the Republican governors and legislators will have to explain the new wave of victims, even deaths, they are spawning in the name of saving a life.

There is no mystery as to where this divide is.

Look at the map; the far-right has taken over legislatures in the South, Southwest, and middle of America. Our electoral college system was designed to protect states’ rights with smaller populations. It’s done an excellent job.

This is a time to beware of the self-serving, divisive, and hysterical declarations of both sides.

People who care about the right to abortion might stop worrying about Washington – there’s no help coming from there – and start paying attention to state legislatures.

The Constitution does say that issues not outlined by the Founding Fathers are left to the states to decide. So the struggle moves away from Washington.

The numbers are behind the Republican extremists in most of the country. But extremists vote a lot more regularly than progressives and feminists. Until that changes, nothing else will.

The anti-abortion movement has always understood that the key to banning abortions is to work at the local, not the national level.

The Supreme Court has made this all too clear.

According to the Center For Reproductive Rights, 24 states are likely to ban abortion if the court allows them to do so: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Do you know who your state legislator is?

Research from December on the estimated changes in distances to clinics for some seeking abortions found that if Roe is overturned, the number of legal abortions is likely to fall by 10 percent.

Research has also found that although women from all backgrounds seek abortions at some point, women who receive abortions in the United States are likely to be unmarried; in their 20s, they have low incomes and already have a child.

They are disproportionately likely to be black and more likely to live in a Democratic state.

This is a time for people of good hearts and goodwill to stay calm and be strong. It just is not true that this fight is hopeless and over. It is just beginning.

Perspective is everything, and the more hysterical our media and dialogue get, the harder it is to find.

As Trump did, and as Vladimir Putin is learning, there is a great appetite – especially in democracies – for freedom.

If you wonder how hard people will fight for their freedom when they are threatened with its loss, watch the news from Ukraine.

This issue is critical to millions of women. They are not about to drop it.

They will soon make themselves heard.

I believe the Trumpist movement against women and minorities and immigrants has gone too far and vastly underestimated women and people of color and immigrants and their growing power.

It is a clear overreach to take away a 50-year-old right in such an arbitrary, political and cruel way.

I don’t believe it will stand. Women are willing to fight for it, and many men are ready to support them. I’m in.