An article from Harper's a couple years ago makes the point that this case and cases like it involve a lot of stomach-turning detail about what mid-term abortions really look like... and for the anti-abortion crowd, that's the point.
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban does not prohibit what most people think it prohibits. It is not a late-abortion law. Apart from a single quoted remark in its “findings” section, which is a kind of declaratory preface, the ban contains no mention at all of third-trimester abortion, or of any gestational point in pregnancy. It criminalizes only by method, outlawing some actions during a pregnancy termination but not others, meaning that as practical legislation—isolated from its mission, that is, and considered solely as a directive on what physicians may and may not do in a procedure room—it makes clear ethical sense only to people who don't spend much time thinking about abortion. Defending the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban in court, as teams of Justice Department lawyers were dispatched this spring and summer to do, requires arguing to judges that pulling a fetus from a woman's body in dismembered pieces is legal, medically acceptable, and safe; but that pulling a fetus out intact, so that if the woman wishes the fetus can be wrapped in a blanket and handed to her, is appropriately punishable by a fine, or up to two years' imprisonment, or both.
There's a lot of other stuff in this article, some of it potentially trouble-triggering, so I'm not quoting it here, but he article is definitely worthwhile, if sobering, reading.
A first-person account explaining why this ban is so bad
Edited to add: And here's another (heartbreaking) one
What she said
