HUNTSVILLE, Alabama, February 8, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Personhood Alabama has filed a lawsuit against the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives (AWC) abortion facility on behalf of a man whose preborn child was aborted despite his pleas to his girlfriend to keep the baby.
Ryan Magers filed the lawsuit in Madison County Wednesday, ABC affiliate WAAY 31 reports. The abortion happened in 2017, while his girlfriend was six weeks pregnant with the child the lawsuit calls Baby Roe.
“I just tried to plead with her and plead with her and just talk to her about it and see what I could do, but in the end, there was nothing I could do to change her mind,” Magers said, adding it was “like my whole world fell apart” and declaring that “every child from conception is a baby and deserves to live.”
“I'm here for the men who actually want to have their baby,” he explained of his lawsuit. “Even though there's nothing I can do for the situation I was in, there is something I can do for the future situations for other people.”
The suit is seeking damages from AWC, three unnamed “agents, employees, directors, representatives, contractors, or servants of the Alabama Women’s Center,” and the pharmaceutical company responsible for the abortion pill AWC dispensed to Baby Roe’s mother.
AWC owner Dalton Johnson told WAAY he was unaware of the lawsuit, but stressed that abortions at six weeks are legal.
Citing statute, judicial precedent, and the Alabama Constitution, the suit notes that under “Alabama law, an unborn child is a legal person,” and a press release from Personhood Alabama notes that “just this past November Alabamians approved an amendment to the state constitution declaring that it is the ‘public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.’”
“During the last decade, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued seven decidedly pro-life decisions which recognize the personhood of the unborn,” the press release continues. “Three of these cases, Mack v. Carmack, Hamilton v. Scott, and Stinnett v. Kennedy involved wrongful death suits and interpreted the world ‘child’ in the Wrongful Death Act to include unborn children as well as born children.”
In addition to Alabama voters enshrining the sanctity of life and rejecting a “right” to abortion in their state constitution last fall, the state currently has a dismemberment abortion ban working through the court system.
“Baby Roe's innocent life was taken by the profiteering of the Alabama Women’s Center and while no court will be able to bring Baby Roe back to life, we will seek the fullest extent of justice on behalf of Baby Roe and Baby Roe's father,” Magers’ attorney Brent Helms said. “The time is ripe for consistency in Alabama’s jurisprudence: either we fully acknowledge the personhood of the unborn or we cherry pick which innocents we protect and which ones we trash for profit.”
Helms told WAAY he believed this case was the first of its kind in the state, and expressed hope that it could establish new precedent for the preborn.
While recent controversies in New York and Virginia have put the spotlight on late-term abortion and infanticide, Personhood Alabama spokeswoman Hannah Ford argues the Baby Roe case is a “timely reminder that every single abortion committed is a chilling assault on a precious and innocent human life – an intolerable violation of the most basic, God-given human right, the right to life.”