Republicans across the country winced three years ago when the term “war on women” entered the lexicon — the result of gaffes that included use of the phrase “legitimate rape” by Missouri GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin and Rush Limbaugh’s attack on feminist Sandra Fluke as a “slut” after she lobbied legislators for health insurance coverage for contraceptives.

The war, it seems, hasn’t ended.

Political observers say Republicans may again be toying with a strategy that threatens to resurrect the theme, this time with a GOP-backed drive to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides health care to 2.7 million Americans annually and that studies show has served 1 in 5 American women.

Jessica Levinson, a professor of politics and ethics at Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, says she’s not surprised that the GOP rhetoric over Planned Parenthood has ramped up as more than a dozen presidential candidates aiming to raise their poll numbers.

Defunding Planned Parenthood “may be a winner” for Republican candidates intent on energizing voters and donors and for “trying to get some of the oxygen away from Donald Trump,” who has big-footed their presidential race, she says.

GOP senators, including presidential candidates Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, are demanding a vote on defunding the organization as early as Monday — Cruz has even raised the threat of a government shutdown this fall over the issue.

Levinson says they — and their party — could pay the price in the general election next year. “This is not going to make a lot of new friends with female voters and young voters,” she said.

One more time

Indeed, a new poll released last week suggests Republicans may be setting up a deja vu reminder of the last presidential election.

“When Mitt Romney talked about getting rid of Planned Parenthood in 2012, it was an extremely important signifier to women voters that he was deeply out of touch with their lives,” says Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research, a major national polling firm that recently conducted a nationwide survey for Planned Parenthood on the controversy. “There’s no reason to think the same thing won’t happen, for exactly the same reasons, in 2016.”

He said his firm’s poll of 800 registered voters showed that two-thirds of respondents registered “broad and deep opposition” to defunding Planned Parenthood, and that by a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans would prefer candidates who support continued funding.

The controversy fired up after a conservative group, the Center for Medical Progress, released undercover videos of Planned Parenthood representatives appearing to be negotiating the sale of fetal tissue, which would be illegal.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, insists that the videos were “heavily edited” and that her organization has never profited from the sale of fetal tissues. She said the video releases are the work of a “militant” antiabortion faction linked to groups like Operation Rescue, some of whose members have been accused of bombing abortion clinics and collaborating with the man convicted of murdering Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in 2009. On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order blocking any such video releases, at least until Monday.

Respected research

Richards said research on fetal tissues is legal and conducted at some of the nation’s leading institutions and teaching hospitals — including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins University — where it has contributed to “treatments for a wide variety of diseases and better understanding and prevention of maternal and fetal health conditions.”

But her arguments have not calmed the increasingly fierce reactions from Republicans, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a staunch social conservative who has made headlines with the Planned Parenthood controversy. The latest came last week, when he was asked by a reporter if stopping abortion meant using the FBI and federal troops. Said Huckabee: “We’ll see, if I get to be president.”

In Sacramento, Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore (Riverside County), has requested a state audit of Planned Parenthood, saying that “taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook” if the organization is “running its own body-part chop shop.”

The rhetoric has fired up Democratic women on Capitol Hill, where the battle is already becoming a “war on women” declaration.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, has vowed that her party will “overwhelmingly” fight any government spending bill that defunds Planned Parenthood — a signal that the partisan divide has already upped the stakes for a government shutdown if Congress can’t pass a stopgap measure.

California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have also expressed outrage, with Boxer calling the proponents “extremists who don’t believe women deserve reproductive health care.”

Careful strategy

Bill Whalen, a fellow with the Hoover Institution and an adviser to former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, says the issue is “a messaging challenge for Republicans” that will require skillful framing.

“If you have a debate over providing health-care services to women, you lose,” he said. “If this becomes a conversation solely about women’s right to have an abortion, then it becomes a conversation about the ‘war on women.’”

But “if you have the debate over whether Planned Parenthood should be selling dead fetus parts ... then the public starts getting very queasy,” he said. “So if Republicans want to have a conversation about how Planned Parenthood may be doing things that don’t necessarily support the mission, then that’s an honest conversation to have — and possibly a politically smart one to have.”

Carla Marinucci is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. E-mail: cmarinucci@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @cmarinucci