Republican leaders have chosen an odd way to try to win back female voters alienated by relentless G.O.P. attacks on women’s health care and freedoms. Instead of backing off, they’re digging in, clinging to an approach that gave President Obama a 12-point advantage among women in the 2012 election and provided the slim margin of victory for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, in 2013. On the national level and even in some red states, the party’s stance on women’s rights is plainly not helping it.

Yet the ideological tide rolls on. States dominated by Republicans continue to enact new abortion restriction. The Republican National Committee last week heard Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, suggest that Democrats favor universal access to free contraception because they think women “cannot control their libido” without the help of “Uncle Sugar.” And this week, the Republican-led House is expected to pass the deceptively named No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.

Federal financing for abortion has been outlawed since 1976 by what’s known as the Hyde Amendment, harming poor women and others who rely on the federal government for their health care. Now here comes the House with a new bill that would erect new obstacles to women who might seek an abortion. For instance, it would deny tax credits to small businesses that offer health plans including abortion coverage, as most such plans now do, thus discouraging businesses from offering such plans. The measure’s treatment of tax benefits as the equivalent of public spending for abortion seems especially strange in a landscape where people are permitted to deduct donations to religious institutions despite the constitutional bar on government support of religion. Other insidious provisions would permanently codify the Hyde Amendment, now subject to annual approval, and a ban on the District of Columbia’s use of locally raised revenue to provide abortion care.

The new measure is the latest iteration of a bill introduced by Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, in 2010 and passed by the House in 2011 after gaining notoriety because of wording (subsequently deleted amid broad public criticism) limiting the rape exception to “forcible” rapes.