Add to that the personal factor: this person sees their doctor regularly, that one can't afford the co-pay and sees the doctor only occasionally, the other has no insurance and sees no one until far too late, this one over here just never took it seriously and skipped appointments despite excellent insurance, that one saw the doctor regularly but was hiding a wee bit of an alcohol problem.

Late term abortions account for 1.4% of all abortions and something in the neighborhood of 0.2% of all pregnancies, so clearly we're talking about something well out of the ordinary to begin with. The procedure under attack is only one of a number of medical interventions (presumably, as in all medical procedure, the specific procedure used depends on that patient's specific needs), so we're talking about a smaller subset of that small set. All in all, it's pretty clear to me that this is the "all else has failed" alternative.

And no, we don't grant a woman "...the right to kill her perfectly normally formed and developed offspring in the womb", not in late term. Roe was not a carte blanche; it left to the states authority to set restrictions later in pregnancy, and as far as I know such restrictions exist. We're not talking about women who've gone through 24 weeks of throwing up and all the other crap associated with pregnancy only to decide at that late date that they'd rather not have a kid. There are already laws to deal with that one, on those rare occasions that such a one should surface. We are dealing with the "all else has failed" set.

That's part of what makes this troubling. This thing's a bit like watching the trial and conviction of one suspect only to see them wheel out someone else entirely for the execution.

(And yes, a Cesarean is an alternative - sometimes. However, any kind of cutting into a body invites certain inevitable risks, and some that might handle this procedure might not be good candidates for any kind of surgery. Someone with an impaired immune system or a history of strokes or blood-clotting problems, for example, might be at substantially higher risk from a Cesarean than from a procedure that leaves them intact. That's the thing about this legislation: it doesn't protect the fetus, it just compels the doctor to use another method, one that might not be as safe. Thus the court hasn't acted to protect the fetus but to enhance the power of the state by asserting a state right to prohibit specific medical procedures without regard to the medical realities.)