MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Legal Newsline) – The father of an aborted fetus has lost his wrongful death lawsuit, while one of the Alabama Supreme Court justices took the opportunity to make known his opinion of the pro-choice Roe v. Wade ruling.
It was all part of a unanimous ruling handed down Oct. 30 by the court, which found Ryan Magers’ appellate brief failed to make an argument against the trial court decision against him.
He failed to cite cases, statutes and other authorities in his argument section, the court ruled.
"Under Alabama law, an unborn child is a legal person and the estate of a child who was killed by abortion in utero can sue the abortion providers (et al.) for wrongful death,” his argument started, before a list of various state laws and court rulings.
“Magers’ argument thus consists of one conclusory statement followed by a string of citation,” the ruling says. “Magers does not discuss how the cited authority is relevant to his argument.”
Magers sued the Alabama Women’s Center Reproductive Alternatives in Madison County Circuit Court in 2019, two years after a woman aborted the child he fathered when she was six weeks pregnant.
Though the majority opinion is mostly dedicated to Rule 28, requiring the citations Magers made to be explained further, Justice Jay Mitchell dedicated a concurring opinion to his displeasure with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.
First, the central holding of Roe -- that there is a constitutional right to have an abortion based on a judicially created trimester framework -- has no grounding in the text of the United States Constitution,” Mitchell wrote.
Roe and a subsequent ruling “hamstring states as they seek to prevent human tragedy and suffering,” Mitchell wrote. He worries that states can’t pass their own laws to protect the unborn.
“Roe and Casey are untethered from the text and history of the Constitution and, for that reason, have never been accepted by a critical mass of the American people,” Mitchell wrote.
“Further, those precedents require judges -- many of whom are unelected -- to make policy decisions that lie outside the judicial power. All of these features make Roe and Casey ripe for reversal. The time has come for the United States Supreme Court to overrule Roe and Casey.”