What it's all about.

The steamed dissent in the Gonzales case castigates the majority, claiming that it traduces a right that has "centrality to women's lives."

Here, from today's majority opinion, is what is so essential (indeed, nonnegotiable) to the advancement of women's equality in America, stripped of the usual ass-covering passive voice and euphemism that abortion proponents have to fog the air with:

"Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms, everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. . . . The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall....The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a highpowered
suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used."

Dr. Haskell's approach is not the only method of killing the fetus once its head lodges in the cervix, and the process has evolved since his presentation. Another doctor, for example, squeezes the skull after it has been pierced, so that enough brain tissue exudes to allow the head to pass through. Still other physicians reach into the cervix with their forceps and crush the fetus' skull. Others continue to pull the fetus out of the woman until it disarticulates at the neck, in effect decapitating it. These doctors then grasp the head with forceps, crush it, and remove it.

Gonzales, Slip Opinion at p. 8 (ellipses in original).

In retrospect, I guess there was a difference between a Bush win and a Kerry victory in 2004.