"Health of the Mother"

If one reads the first few pages of the Carhart decision from the U.S. District Court (Nebraska), you see the justice's reply to my question as to why we cannot ban partial birth abortion (and apparently other full-term abortion procedures):

I declare the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003" unconstitutional because it does not allow, and instead prohibits, the use of the procedure when necessary to preserve the health of a woman.

This is usually the final battleground on which abortion questions are fought, after all the initial claims and misrepresentations (the procedure doesn't exist, it is almost never done, it is only done on nonviable fetuses, etc.) are proven false. And this argument has been a particularly challenging one for abortion-rights advocates to honestly make. The challenge here is coming up with a scenario in which chemical dilation of the cervix followed by partial delivery of the baby, killing the baby and only then delivering the (dead) baby the rest of the way is safer than C-section, which from first incision to delivery typically takes five to ten minutes. To that end, Carhart cites a handful of scenarios (e.g. the mother has placental cancer, the mother has extreme risk factors for bleeding) for which "intact D&X" is safer for the mother.

In response, I merely point out that this argument is only contemplatable when the baby is considered at the outset to be a non-person. If we are taking the health of two people into consideration instead of just one, it becomes obvious that even the exceptional circumstances described above call for different procedures to manage the risks in attempting to secure two survivors. To take a more mundane example, mothers (particularly single mothers) put their health at risk routinely because they have children. Just getting behind the wheel of a car to go to work in the morning after a sleepless night with an infant is an elevated health risk. Yet no one suggests that such risk be reduced by killing the child. So why the stampede to "intact dilation and extraction" to manage risk in late-term pregnancy, unless of course the goal all along is to only have one survivor?