Arizona Man Awarded $67,500 on Behalf of Aborted Embryo
The ex-husband of an Arizona woman who voluntarily took abortion pills in 2018 has won a civil lawsuit against the clinic that prescribed them.
An Arizona abortion clinic that didn't tell a pregnant woman about the physical characteristics of her 8-week-old embryo before prescribing abortion pills has been found liable in a case brought by the ex-husband of the pregnant woman, who didn't want her to get an abortion.
The ex-husband, Mario Villegas, was awarded $67,500 in a civil lawsuit accusing the clinic of violating an informed consent law that an Arizona court declared unconstitutional earlier this year.
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'A Dangerous Precedent'
The Lawyering Project, which represented the doctor and clinic being sued by Villegas, had warned that the case could "establish a dangerous precedent in Arizona concerning embryonic personhood and chill the provision of abortion care."
"A pre-viability embryo or fetus is not a person," says its website in a summary of the case, "and a physician cannot be subject to a wrongful death action for providing high-quality abortion care to a patient who wants an abortion."
In an August 2024 order, Judge Bryan B. Chambers of the Arizona Superior Court in Gila County agreed with the defendants that Arizona's wrongful death statute does not, as written, apply to the death of embryos. The court is "unwilling to expand the common law definition of 'person' as applied to the wrongful death statute to include all unborn children whether viable outside the womb or not," Chambers wrote.
But that doesn't mean he tossed Villegas' lawsuit entirely. And in a judgement released July 22 but largely unnoticed until this week, Chambers wound up holding that Villegas is entitled to $5,000 in statutory damages and $62,500 "in compensatory damages for his psychological, emotional, and physical injuries."
No one in the case alleges that Villegas' ex-wife—referred to in court documents as M.S.V.—was tricked, coerced, or generally uninformed about the abortion. The case turns on technicalities and Arizona's onerous, biased (and now barred) requirements for what abortion doctors must tell patients in order to obtain informed consent.
'Deprived of the love….of his child'
M.S.V's abortion took place in July 2018, when she was around eight weeks pregnant. At the Camelback Family Planning clinic in Phoenix, she was provided with information at least 24 hours before she could come back for the abortion pills, and she signed various consent forms, including one affirming that she was "comfortable with [her] decision to terminate this pregnancy," according to ProPublica.
Around two years later, in July 2020, Villegas—now divorced from M.S.V.—sued the clinic and physician Gabrielle J. Goodrick, alleging medical malpractice and wrongful death. Villegas "has been deprived of the love, affection, comfort, and companionship of his child," his initial complaint stated. He "has been deprived of his constitutionally protected right to parent Baby Villegas."
Villegas sought to have himself appointed the personal representative of the estate of the aborted embryo, and a probate judge agreed.
In an amended complaint, Villegas added that "the estate has been deprived of the net income Baby Villegas would have earned during her lifetime" and sought damages for that, too. (Villegas took the liberty of assuming the embryo was a girl, even though the abortion would have been too early in the pregnancy to tell.)
"Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician," noted ProPublica in a 2022 article about the case. "But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said."
Informed Consent or Compelled Speech?
Ultimately, the case came down to Arizona's informed consent law, not fetal personhood.
In the amended complaint, Villegas argued that the clinic had violated Arizona law on informed consent for abortion.
That law—declared unconstitutional in February 2026—said that doctors must obtain informed consent before performing abortions (which is normal) and then added that this consent only counts if clinics obtain it in highly particular (and medically unnecessary) way and tack on a lot of loaded language and anti-abortion rhetoric.
It says that "at least twenty-four hours before the abortion, the physician who is to perform the abortion or the referring physician" must inform a patient woman "orally and in person" about topics such as "alternatives to the procedure or treatment" and "the probable anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child at the time the abortion is to be performed." Doctors were also required to tell a woman seeking an abortion that if she went through with the pregnancy, various forms of assistance may be available.
Villegas alleged that even though his wife technically consented to the abortion, it didn't count because the information wasn't provided by the same doctor who prescribed her the pills, and because doctors didn't warn her about the potential "loss of the 'maternal-fetal' attachment bond inherent in birthing a child" and didn't explain alternatives to abortion or the 8-week-old embryo's physical characteristics.
He also complained that the printed form M.S.V. was given "changed the statutory term 'the probable gestational age of the unborn child' to 'the probable gestational age of the pregnancy,' which misstates Arizona's legislative determination that every pregnant woman is carrying a human child."
M.S.V. testified in court "that nothing would have changed her mind about obtaining the abortion," as Chambers put it in his judgement. And no one alleges that the clinic simply failed to discuss some risks and other relevant information with her before the procedure. It simply failed to use the loaded language preferred by the state.
But "the statute does not require proof that M.S.V. would have made a different decision had she been fully informed," wrote Chambers in his judgement. And even if some of the rules of informed consent were followed, "nothing in [Arizona law] suggests that substantial compliance with the consent provisions is all that is necessary."
Fortunately, the informed consent law at the heart of this case has been struck down, so future doctors don't have to worry about being sued for failing to say "unborn child."
But there's still something chilling about the way all this played out. M.S.V. had argued to court that she was tricked into pregnancy—she thought her ex-husband "was fixed," because he'd had a vasectomy, though it was since reversed. Chambers said this did not negate her consent to sex with him, since M.S.V. "was not deceived about the nature of the act. At most, she was deceived about a potential consequence (pregnancy risk)."
In M.S.V.'s telling, she did not exactly give informed consent to the sex that led to pregnancy, but she did give informed consent to the abortion procedure. In neither situation, however, do M.S.V.'s claims about her own consent seem to have mattered much at all.
In the News
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) shows "significant weakness" when it comes to protecting passenger data, according to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
A TSA authentication vendor "was able to access and extract sensitive passenger information, including driver's license and passport images, during system troubleshooting and enhancements, without TSA's knowledge," the report says. More:
TSA lacked clear policies, did not track when this data was extracted, could not verify that extracted information was properly deleted, and did not notify passengers when their biometric and biographic information may have been stored. As a result, although passenger information was generally protected during routine operations, weaknesses in vendor oversight created a risk that sensitive personal information could be retained or exposed.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation comments:
As the OIG's audit underscores, this technology presents privacy risks associated with unsecured data, unauthorized access, and data breaches. The government's use of this technology also creates a mass surveillance system and facilitates the creation of warrantless biometric records for unconsenting parties.
[…] Given that facial recognition technology is prone to mistakes, combined with the OIG's audit revealing significant privacy weaknesses, it is imperative that travelers remember that opting out is possible. TSA's own website emphasizes that travelers who wish to decline to have their photo taken for facial comparison can do so without any delay, disruption, or recourse.
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