

Raven West, a heroin addict who gave birth to a stillborn baby, received a five-year suspended sentence last year. Last year, Jessica Lindsey, 29, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to chemical endangerment for using heroin while pregnant. “Every time I speak to someone, they come up with something new.” “At this stage, we don’t know all of the ramifications,” he said. He acknowledged that conferring “personhood” so early in a pregnancy had the potential to affect everything from fertility treatment - which discards fertilized eggs that aren’t used - to the freedom of women who play risky sports or drink wine. His is the first case, he said, to “establish personhood for even an unborn aborted child.”
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Jones - that pushes the envelope of “personhood” for many in Alabama.īrent Helms, the attorney who filed the wrongful-death suit on a contingency basis, said that case law had already established personhood for fetuses who perish at the hands of reckless people, such as drunken drivers or domestic abusers.

In the wake of that vote, a Madison County judge ruled that a 19-year-old man could pursue a wrongful-death lawsuit against a clinic and a pharmaceutical company that provided an abortion pill to his girlfriend. Last November, Alabama voters approved a ballot measure that amended the state’s constitution to recognize the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

And many are now watching as the movement gains momentum in Alabama, which already has some of the most restrictive reproductive rights laws in the country.īut in Pleasant Grove, a city of 10,000 people on the western outskirts of Birmingham, the case appears to have caused little controversy.

Activists have also cited it as a demonstration of the dangers of the “personhood” movement, which pushes for the rights of fetuses to be recognized as equal to - or even more important than - the rights of the mothers who carry them.
