Goodbye, O'Connor. Goodbye, Choice.

Right off the mark, this NARAL ad is running at the top of the NYT website: Take Action: Don't Let Anti-Choice Extremists Win the Fight for the Supreme Court.
But they will, by October.
Is there anyone in the world who thinks that Bush will not seize on this tremendous opportunity to put in place an anti-abortion judge? Is there anyone who thinks that this is not exactly why the Christian Right elected him and a Republican Senate in the first place?
Goodbye, Roe v Wade. Goodbye Women's Right to Choose.
Earlier this spring the Republicans in Senate would not overturn the fillibuster rule and destroy the Senate's advise and consent role, just for Bolton or for the other intellectual lightweights Bush wanted to appoint. But the Republicans will definitely overturn the fillibuster for this, if they need to, to make sure an anti-abortion judge replaces O'Connor.
And it would not matter if this tears the Senate and the country apart. It wouldn't matter if a million people marched in New York or Los Angeles or Boston or even Atlanta in support of women's right to choose. Bush and the boys simply DO NOT CARE WHAT WOMEN THINK.
As I have pointed out before, this is actually an end to choice, not to abortion. As a medical procedure which can save a woman's life, the abortion procedure will still be available. The difference is that the woman herseof will not be able to chose it. Instead, the choice will be made by a committee of doctors and/or of Christian Right hospital board members -- and you can bet that the grounds will be pretty narrow.
Rape? Incest? Extreme youth? Amniocentosis results showing disability? Nope, not good enough. Neither your body nor your choices matter anymore, woman -- get back into the kitchen and take off those shoes!
Anyone in the US who is now younger than 40 does not remember a time when women did not have the right to have a legal abortion if they wanted to.
They don't remember what a long, hard battle it was to establish the principle that women, and everyone else for that matter, should have the right to make their own moral and ethical decisions.
They're about to find out.
And when I think of the 2004 election and the horrendous impact it will have on America, I think of the Frost poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
. . . long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other . . .
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

UPDATE: Americablog points out that the impact will be broader than just abortion. All of Scalia's dissents will now be the majority opinions . . . And Americablog seems to think there may actually be a chance of winning this one in the Senate. Well, I hope so. Fight the good fight!