What you've got, baby, is power! Let's hear it for power! Control! Authority! All those lovely, if morally corrosive, items! When you've got power, you're No. 1. That means whoever else is around is No. 2 at best. Stick it to 'em, baby!
Well, I might exaggerate, but only a teeny bit, because 95 times out of 100 -- allowing for cases where pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, and where continued pregnancy might endanger the mother's health -- abortion concerns empowerment.
Linda Greenhouse's biography of Blackmun -- who wrote the 7-2 decision in Roe, striking down state restrictions on abortion -- is instructive for numerous reasons: not least the account of how Blackmun himself, on his way to becoming the court's most liberal member, locked on the connection between Roe and power feminism. "A woman's right to make that choice," he wrote in 1986, "is fundamental. Any other result, in our view, would protect inadequately a central part of the sphere of liberty that our law guarantees equally to all." The power feminists were duly grateful, with Gloria Steinem assuring Blackmun, "You have saved more American women's lives than anyone in our nation's history." Not counting, naturally, the lives of unborn post-Roe girls.
We may depend on Steinem and such to weigh in heavily concerning John Roberts. The last thing they want is jurists who might challenge their power through the assertion of constitutional principles different than their own: principles from a time when, to Americans, life came before mere power.