WASHINGTON — In the most contested races for control of the U.S. House, many Republican candidates are speaking up about women’s rights to abortion access and reproductive care in new and surprising ways, a deliberate shift for a GOP blindsided by some political ramifications of the post-Roe v. Wade era.

Looking directly into the camera for ads, or penning personal op-eds in local newspapers, the Republicans are trying to distance themselves from some of the more aggressive anti-abortion ideas coming from their party and its allies. Instead the Republican candidates are working quickly to spell out their own views separate from a GOP that for decades has worked to put restrictions on reproductive care.

In New York, endangered GOP Rep. Mark Lawler, sitting at a kitchen table with his wife in one ad said, “There can be no place for extremism in women’s health care.”

In California, GOP Rep. Michelle Steel explains her own journey to parenthood with in vitro fertilization and vows, “I have always supported women’s access to IVF, and will fight to defend it.”

And in Arizona, GOP Rep. Juan Ciscomani faces the camera and says, “I want you to hear directly from me: I trust women. I cherish new life. And I reject the extremes on abortion.”

It’s a remarkable new approach as the Republican Party works to prevent losses this November that could wipe out its majority control of the House. It comes in a fast-moving election season with high-profile and gripping stories of women’s lives being upended and endangered by abortion restrictions.

The new strategy is both sanctioned and promoted by the House Republicans’ campaign arm, an acknowledgement of the GOP’s failure to grasp the political power of women’s reproductive care as an issue that would mobilize voters.

“The Republicans have always known they’re actually on the wrong side of this issue,” said Ilyse Hogue, former president of the group previously known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, who is now a senior fellow at New America, a think tank in Washington. She said the party’s shift “wouldn’t surprise me.”

With the election fewer than 50 days away, the House Republican candidates are real-time road-testing how to talk about women’s access to reproductive care at a time when young women are more liberal than in decades.

On the national level, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has both celebrated the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case overruling Roe v. Wade yet insisted it’s best left to the states to decide whether to allow abortions. He’s also distanced himself from the far right’s longtime goal of a national abortion ban.

With Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris having replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the party’s ticket, Democrats are capitalizing on the vice president’s ability to mobilize women, and others, and vow to reinstate reproductive care in a campaign whose rally-goers cheer: “We are not going back.”

The campaigns for control of the U.S. House are as tight as ever, with a few seats expected to determine which party holds the majority in the chamber, and whether Congress will become aligned with the White House or a potential opposition check on a new administration.

Republicans admit they did not expect abortion access to become such a determinative issue when the Supreme Court, in 2022, decided the Dobbs case that struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the right to abortion that had been the law of the land for nearly 50 years.

Voters didn’t always mention abortion access as a top concern in the 2022 election, Republicans said, but it became disqualifying for candidates who were portrayed as too extreme.