I don’t know what you think “gratuitous” means, but it doesn’t mean “without any motive.” Of course the USSC had a motive; they wanted to “legalize” abortion.
When I said their assertion that the unborn child is not a “person” is “gratuitous,” I meant that they asserted it without any BASIS, without any RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION.
It was, as Rehnquist wrote, an “exercise of raw judicial power.”
The basis was to explicitly limit the applicability of the decision to the limitations of the legal definition of a "14th Amendment person." I have already described those limitations in my previous post. In doing this, the Court was being EXTREMELY rational - it made sure that there could be NO OTHER APPLICATION of its ruling.
Roberts did the same thing with his Obamacare ruling - explicit statements of LIMITED jurisdictional application.