Ryan Magers, the plaintiff in a lawsuit in Alabama seeking to deny a woman's right to bodily autonomy

In November 2018, voters in the state of Alabama approved an amendment to the state’s constitution to make it state policy to "recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life." Now a probate judge in Madison County in the northern part of the state has ruled that a fetus is a person with legal rights, and that the so-called estate of an aborted fetus has standing to participate in legal activities. The ruling is another advance in Alabama’s efforts to eliminate abortion access entirely should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

The ruling by Probate Judge Frank Barger comes in connection with a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a man named Ryan Magers last month against the Alabama Women’s Center, a women’s health clinic in Huntsville that is one of the last three facilities in the state that provide abortion care. Magers’ girlfriend had gone to the center to obtain an abortion in 2017; Magers argues that he had tried to dissuade her from having the procedure and wanted her to go through with the pregnancy, but that she had the abortion against his wishes.

The lawsuit states that “Under Alabama law, an unborn child is a legal person,” and includes as defendants, in addition to the health center and its owners and employees, the “Unknown Pharmaceutical Company” that manufactured the medicine the woman was given at the health center to induce abortion. With the probate court’s declaration that the aborted fetus is “a person with legal rights,” its estate is now included as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, which lists the fetus as “deceased child” Baby Roe. Magers’ attorney, Brent Helms, says that, as far as he knows, this is the first time an aborted fetus has been recognized this way in the United States.

In a state that NARAL Pro-Choice America classifies as having severely restricted access to abortion care, and that regularly falls near or at the bottom of rankings of states by such measures as rates of infant mortality and access to health care, the focus of local Republican-led governments and anti-choice activists is preparing Alabama’s legal landscape to make it possible to ban abortion entirely and immediately if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Lost in the shuffle, of course, is any concern for the health and well-being of people of childbearing age in the state.