By a classic act of uniquely Unicameral political logrolling, a two-thirds majority of conservative senators will enact a tighter abortion ban after all.

It was accomplished by linking it to the bitter 2023 session’s most explosive issue — more restrictive regulation of transgender health care for minors — and softening both to keep the coalition’s 32 Republicans and one Democrat together.

Gov. Jim Pillen is expected to sign Legislative Bill 574 early next week, though it’s all but certain that its strident Democratic opponents will swiftly sue and seek to block it from taking effect. (Editor’s note: Governor Jim Pillen signed Legislative Bill 574 into law on May 22, 2023.)

Thus our two major political parties, the two greatest fomenters of our nation’s deepening divisions, will both reap what they want most from it all:

Votes. Campaign cash. More votes.

Make no mistake about it: The parties are the winners here. And, though many among us won’t recognize it for some time, all Nebraskans are the losers.

We ought to be happy, one might argue. It was just two weeks ago that this page lamented the death of the Legislature’s “fetal heartbeat” abortion bill and said a 12-week ban would at least protect a few more unborn children from unjust death.

We suppose we’re satisfied enough with that part of LB 574 — if the looser ban’s grafting onto the transgender bill isn’t found to violate the Nebraska Constitution’s ban on bills containing multiple subjects. We’re not all that confident LB 574 will survive a suit.

We’ve said little about LB 574 in its original form, other than to say conservatives erred strategically by bringing a second divisive hot-button bill to the floor when the original abortion bill (LB 626) was going to be tough enough to pass.

Nebraskans typically have believed in the liberty of adults to make their own decisions about their lives, subject to the Bill of Rights but even more to the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” and “inalienable rights” — of which life is first. Nebraska’s constitution copies those inalienable rights.

Nebraskans also have believed in parents’ responsibility to care for and protect their children, subject to those same rights, so they reach adulthood best equipped to make their own life choices.

Children who feel they’re trapped in the wrong body must be taken seriously. That requires counseling, and perhaps even medication, to help them cope and give them, their parents and their doctors time to see if that feeling persists into adulthood.

But none of us fully knows our own personalities before we reach maturity. That argues powerfully against allowing surgeries on minors based on one’s perceived gender identity. They might well feel differently in a few years — and be unable to reverse course.

As introduced, LB 574 went too far by outlawing hormone and chemical-based treatments for minors. Its final form logically puts those treatments, like many medical procedures, under tighter regulation while banning gender-reassignment surgeries before age 19.

Had lawmakers separately passed this merged bill’s 12-week abortion ban and its now-modified provisions for transgender health care for minors, our misgivings would largely be erased.

But it matters a great deal how goals are pursued and secured.

Pro-life Americans and Nebraskans have fought half a century to turn their fellow citizens’ hearts toward protecting the full humanity of the unborn. We share that goal, as we’ve said before.

But in this cause, like so many throughout time, frustration often yields obsession to achieve a goal no matter the cost — even when that undercuts the moral case for the goal itself.

LB 574’s passage was achieved at the cost of playing right into pro-choice liberals’ narrative that pro-life conservatives don’t care what happens to babies after they’re born. Many ears have closed, likely forever.

That, as it happens, serves one party’s political goal — just as it serves the other party to harness the pro-life cause for its own political goal.

And they have an identical goal: to win elections. Nebraskans want winners to cooperate for the common good. Parties, by all the evidence, do not.

LB 574 leaves behind grievous wreckage in the lawmaking body that Nebraskans founded to — in the words of former Sidney Sen. Jerry Matzke — liberate its members to work together.

If Nebraskans agree that’s unacceptable, they have one choice: Elect lawmakers, be they Democratic or Republican, who will do just that.

This editorial first appeared in the North Platte Telegraph on May 20, 2023. It was distributed by The Associated Press.