A stunning moment in American history decades in the making will reshape politics

The Supreme Court's overturning of a woman's right to an abortion on Friday was a legal, political and societal thunderbolt that merits the overused term "historic" because it will change life in multiple ways, many still unknown.

And it will have to begin as a rearguard action after a stunning defeat as multiple conservative states pass or implement flash laws to outlaw abortion for millions of women.

Some activists are already striving to elect a Republican-led Congress and president who would outlaw abortion not just in conservative states but also in the blue ones that immediately vowed Friday to protect a woman's right to choose.

And while Biden can carp about Republican extremists and liberals complain about Republican presidents failing to win the popular vote, the conservative movement looks just as likely to mobilize to use the US political system to preserve its win as Democrats are to try to overturn it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who did as much as any Republican leader to transform the Supreme Court, praised the years of conservative campaigning that had led to Friday's decision.

"Millions of Americans have spent half a century praying, marching and working toward today's historic victories for the rule of law and for innocent life.

As conservative states begin to outlaw abortion entirely, the ledger of Americans' rights will depend on where they live or conceive.

For apparently the first time in the country's historic march, the Supreme Court has taken away a previously enshrined constitutional right.

The starkly literal reading of the Constitution by the court's conservative majority in this case -- as well as in other judicial haymakers on guns and religion this week -- beckons an era of societal upheaval.

If one constitutional right can be wiped out, why not others?

This week's rulings on abortion and guns have cemented the court's new conservative majority as a staggeringly powerful force in American life -- one with the audacity to make far-reaching change.

The conservative majority suggested in its opinion that sending abortion back to the states to decide will let democracy work it out.

Abortion is likely to drive an already torn nation further into self-estrangement.

A historic campaign to change America

In many ways, Friday's tumultuous events were the right's answer to an almost as epic summer week seven years ago, when the court seemed to launch a period of liberal ascendency by saving the Affordable Care Act and ruling that same-sex marriage was constitutional.

It involved years of confirmations that turned the federal judiciary to the right, then de facto alliances between jurists and conservative politicians in the states to bring cases weakening and eventually ending the federal right to an abortion up through the courts.

And it took Supreme Court nominees misleading Senate confirmation hearings, with a wink and a nod, on their opposition to overturning precedent to create the majority in the marble-pillared Supreme Court chamber that would finish the job.

The movement was especially energized by the conservative renaissance that President Ronald Reagan engineered.

As California governor, he had signed a law allowing some exceptions to abortion but changed his views after a long period of soul searching and after spotting an opening to use the issue to electrify the conservative movement.

For abortion rights activists, meanwhile, the next few presidential elections just got even more critical and will test whether complacency among liberals about the supposed inviolability of the right to end a pregnancy will begin to change.