In Alabama, a man is suing for what he believes is his right: to allow any man to force a female partner to give birth against her will. In a bizarre twist, a judge has allowed a no-longer-in-existence embryo to sue as well. It’s a case that highlights the fundamental divide between the pro-choice movement and the anti-abortion (and, often, anti-contraception) one: is the debate just about “life”? Or is it about allowing men and the government to control women – our lives, our futures, and the very skin, organs and bones we live in?

This case brings the stakes into sharp clarity.

The facts of the case are fairly straightforward and fairly common: Ryan Magers got his teenage then girlfriend pregnant. She didn’t want to be pregnant (according to her father, she didn’t even really want to have sex with Magers). She found out about the pregnancy early, and had an abortion at six weeks, over Magers’s objections. Magers was angry, and sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives, the facility at which his ex ended her pregnancy. He also petitioned to represent the estate of “Baby Roe”, the six-week-old embryo, and probate judge Frank Barber granted his request. This enables Magers to sue both the clinic and the manufacturer of the pill his ex used to end her pregnancy on behalf of the embryo, and is the first time an embryo or a fetus has been legally recognized as a person.

Part of the issue is Alabama’s “personhood” law, a measure penned and pushed by anti-abortion groups. Those laws are written to endow fetuses and embryos with a full spectrum of rights, and to create the exact kind of complex legal landscape that lets cases like this one move forward. And part of the issue is the fundamental goal of the anti-abortion movement: to control what women can and cannot do, and to frame us primarily as incubators and vessels for the desires of others, not individuals with our own desires, our own aspirations, and our own agency.

The lawsuit itself is a good example. Throughout, the teenage girl who Magers impregnated is referred to as “the mother” (it also refers to the embryo as a “baby”; subsequent reporting has also erroneously called it a fetus). While those in the anti-abortion movement claims to revere motherhood, they are, in reality, profoundly disrespectful of it. A 16-year-old who has never birthed nor raised a child and who had a very early abortion precisely to avoid becoming a mother is not a mother. Motherhood isn’t just about getting pregnant. It is about taking on the enormous, life-bending load of caring for a small creature.

There are a lot of ways to become a mother, and birth doesn’t have to be the line. Certainly women who lose very wanted pregnancies, which they tended to and cared for and nurtured out of deep love and desire, may claim the title; certainly women who didn’t give birth themselves but adopted, loved and raised their children are mothers; certainly women who did give birth but surrendered a child to someone else out of devotion to their child and hope that their baby would be better cradled in another’s arms are mothers, too. Motherhood is a relationship; it relates to pregnancy, but pregnancy is not all it is. It is, fundamentally, about intention and action, of doing the work of nurturance and cultivation, of offering someone small and vulnerable a specific kind of love and dedication.

I imagine that the millions of women who do not have children but have had elective abortions would be confused and offended to be called mothers. After all, one reason women end pregnancies is because even those of us without children understand some degree of what motherhood entails. We grasp its scale, its significance, its weight. For many women, the choice to end a pregnancy is an honest reckoning with what one has to give – the belief that mothering a child is a lifelong project worth doing well, and the knowledge that one just cannot offer that right now.

I imagine many mothers would be insulted, too, by this insistence of calling any woman or girl who has ever chosen to end a pregnancy a mother. What utter disrespect to the tough and unending work of maternity, to the sacrifices large and small, corporeal and spiritual and psychic, that women make for their children; what utter disrespect to the joys and the overwhelming devotion that, at least according to every mother I’ve ever met, expands in a near-visceral way through every vein and bone in the body. Many women who end pregnancies know this – a majority are, after all, already mothers.

Ryan Magers’s teenage ex-girlfriend didn’t want to be pregnant – maybe it was the wrong time for her to become a mother, maybe Magers was the wrong guy for her, maybe she, as so many women do, saw the future she hoped for herself slipping away. She was, after all, just a high schooler when the pregnancy happened; Magers was her 19-year-old unemployed boyfriend. An unintended or mistimed pregnancy can feel like that: looking at two doors, one of which holds your hopes and the future you so carefully laid the groundwork for, and the other which, at best, holds a vast unknown – and at worst holds the terrifying known of being stuck with a controlling or abusive man, or descending further into poverty, or being trapped in circumstances you were clawing your way so desperately out of. For so many women, the moment you look at a positive pregnancy test, these two doors materialize, and you know you can only walk through one of them.

We don’t know what Ryan Magers’s ex-girlfriend saw behind her two doors, but we know she chose the one that Magers would have the law forcibly lock shut. We know that her father says Magers, who was 19 when he was dating a 16-year-old, pressured the girl into sex. We know that Magers feels so entitled to demand a girl abide by his wishes that he is willing to sue not even to get what he says he wanted – a baby – but to effectively make it impossible for girls and women in the future to choose their own destinies without male oversight and approval. This is what the “pro-life” movement seeks to make a universal reality: controlling men able to demand women stay pregnant and give birth against their will.

The ripple effects could be enormous. A “pro-life” victory here would give free rein to men like Ryan Magers, who allegedly coerced his teenage girlfriend into sex, allowing them even more control over those same girls’ reproductive lives and, by extension, their futures. A great many women and girls have sex with men who are abusive, controlling, or simply not men who they want to be tied to for the rest of their lives. A “pro-life” victory here would give any man jurisdiction over any woman with whom he has had sex.

And it would go farther than that. Giving an embryo full personhood rights could have a slew of consequences that the anti-abortion movement intends, but that even many self-identified pro-life people wouldn’t support. It could outlaw many common types of IVF, for example, as those procedures often produce embryos which are not used. It could turn every miscarriage into a crime scene or potential child abuse case – after all, if a fetus dies inside of a woman and a fetus has the rights of a born person, it’s necessary to figure out the cause, assign blame and potentially level consequences (was the pregnant woman negligent because she didn’t regularly take folic acid? Because she went skiing? Because she ate a bologna sandwich?).

It also could outlaw many forms of contraception – while the weight of the evidence points to the fact that hormonal birth control, emergency contraception and the IUD don’t prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, many in the anti-abortion movement claim that they do. The medical definition of pregnancy is that it begins when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus (this is in part because half of eggs naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the woman’s body without her knowing). But the “pro-life” definition of “life” begins at fertilization. Does every pad and tampon need to be checked for a potential life lost?

This might all sound ridiculous, far-fetched and impossible. But then, until last week, so was the idea of a non-existent embryo suing an abortion clinic.