The former husband of an Arizona woman who chose to take abortion pills in 2018 has secured a victory in a civil lawsuit against the clinic that issued the prescription.
A Phoenix-area abortion clinic that failed to inform the pregnant patient about the physical details of her eight-week embryo before prescribing abortion medication has been deemed liable in a case filed by the woman’s former spouse, who did not want her to terminate the pregnancy.
Mario Villegas, the ex-husband, was awarded $67,500 in a civil action accusing the clinic of violating an informed-consent law that an Arizona court ruled unconstitutional earlier this year.
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‘A Dangerous Precedent’
The Legal Representation Project, which stood for the physician and the clinic facing Villegas, cautioned that the ruling could set a perilous precedent in Arizona regarding embryonic personhood and could deter abortion care from being offered.
“A pre-viability embryo or fetus is not a person,” the project notes on its site in a summary of the case, “and a physician cannot be held liable for wrongful death for delivering high-quality abortion care to a patient seeking one.”
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, as written, does not apply to the death of embryos. The court stated it would not broaden the common-law definition of “person” within the wrongful-death statute to include all unborn children—even those not viable outside the womb.
Yet that did not dispose of Villegas’ lawsuit entirely. In a ruling issued July 22 but largely overlooked until recently, Chambers concluded 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 claims that Villegas’ ex-wife—referred to in court records as M.S.V.—was deceived, coerced, or generally uninformed about the abortion. The dispute centers on technicalities and Arizona’s stringent (and now blocked) requirements for what abortion providers must disclose to patients to obtain informed consent.
‘Deprived of the love….of his child’
M.S.V.’s abortion occurred in July 2018, when she was approximately eight weeks pregnant. At the Camelback Family Planning clinic in Phoenix, she received information at least 24 hours before she could return for the abortion pills, and she signed several consent forms, including one confirming she was “comfortable with [her] decision to terminate this pregnancy,” according to ProPublica.
About two years later, in July 2020, Villegas—by then divorced from M.S.V.—sued the clinic and physician Gabrielle J. Goodrick, alleging medical malpractice and wrongful death. Villegas stated that he “has been deprived of the love, affection, comfort, and companionship of his child,” and he claimed he had been deprived of his constitutional right to parent Baby Villegas.
Villegas sought to be appointed as the personal representative of the embryo’s estate, and a probate judge granted the request.
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 assumed the embryo was a girl, even though early in the pregnancy the sex could not be determined.)
“Across the U.S., people have filed negligence suits in the death of a fetus or embryo in scenarios where a pregnant person dies in a vehicle crash or a pregnancy is lost due to alleged medical wrongdoing,” ProPublica noted in a 2022 article about the case. “But pursuing wrongful-death claims for an aborted embryo or fetus is a relatively novel strategy, according to legal experts.”
Informed Consent or Compelled Speech?
In the end, the case hinged on Arizona’s informed-consent statute, not on fetal personhood.
In the amended complaint, Villegas asserted that the clinic violated Arizona’s informed-consent requirements for abortion.
That statute—ruled unconstitutional in February 2026—stated that doctors must obtain informed consent before performing abortions (which is standard) and then added that consent only counts if clinics secure it in a very specific (and medically unnecessary) manner and accompany it with loaded language and anti-abortion rhetoric.
It requires that “at least twenty-four hours before the abortion, the physician who is to perform the abortion or the referring physician” inform a pregnant patient “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 patient seeking an abortion that, if she continues the pregnancy, various forms of assistance may be available.
Villegas contended that although his wife technically consented to the abortion, the consent did not count because the information wasn’t provided by the same doctor who prescribed her pills, and because doctors did not warn her about the possible “loss of the maternal-fetal attachment bond” and did not explain alternatives or the embryo’s eight-week characteristics.
He also argued that the printed form given to M.S.V. altered the statutory phrase “the probable gestational age of the unborn child” to “the probable gestational age of the pregnancy,” which misstates Arizona’s position that every pregnancy involves a human child.
M.S.V. testified in court that nothing would have altered her decision to seek an abortion, Chambers noted in his ruling. And no one claims that the clinic failed to discuss certain risks or other relevant information prior to the procedure. The case centers on whether the clinic used the state’s loaded language.
Yet “the statute does not require proof that M.S.V. would have chosen differently if she had been fully informed,” Chambers wrote in his decision. And even if some provisions of informed consent were followed, “nothing in [Arizona law] suggests that substantial compliance with the consent provisions suffices.”
Fortunately, the informed-consent statute at the heart of this case has been struck down, so future doctors won’t face lawsuits for omitting the phrase “unborn child.”
Nevertheless, the proceedings carry a chilling note. M.S.V. argued in court that she had been misled into pregnancy—she believed her ex-hhusband “was fixed,” because he had undergone a vasectomy, though that procedure had since been reversed. Chambers stated this did not negate her consent to sex, since M.S.V. “was not deceived about the nature of the act. At most, she was misled about a potential consequence (the risk of pregnancy).”
According to M.S.V.’s account, she did not exactly provide informed consent to the sexual activity that led to pregnancy, but she did provide informed consent to the abortion procedure. In either scenario, however, her claims regarding her own consent did not appear to carry much weight in the court’s view.
In the News
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is shown to have significant vulnerabilities in protecting passenger data, according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s 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 states. More:
TSA lacked clear policies, failed to track when this data was extracted, could not verify that extracted information was deleted properly, and did not notify passengers when their biometric and biographic details might have been stored. As a result, although passenger information was generally safeguarded during routine operations, weaknesses in vendor oversight created a risk that sensitive personal data could be retained or exposed.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighs in:
As the OIG’s audit highlights, this technology introduces privacy risks related to unsecured data, unauthorized access, and data breaches. The government’s deployment of this technology also fosters a mass-surveillance framework and supports the creation of biometric records for individuals who did not consent.
[…] With facial recognition technology prone to errors, and the OIG’s audit revealing notable privacy gaps, travelers should keep in mind that opting out is available. TSA’s own site notes that travelers who wish to decline facial-biometrics can do so without delay, disruption, or penalties.
More Sex & Tech
• Covering law-enforcement misuse of Flock cameras has become a full-time beat for some, with recent developments including a former Joliet police lieutenant facing felony charges for improper use of the city’s Flock system, and a Sharonville, Ohio, lieutenant being indicted after allegedly using Flock cameras—29 times between December 19, 2024, and April 20, 2026—to track a person’s whereabouts for personal reasons, according to CBS News and Fox 10 respectively.
• Airbnb now prohibits hosts from forcing guests to wash and dry dishes themselves, reflecting new guidelines for hosts.
I just got an email from Airbnb detailing new rules about what hosts can demand of guests, and THANK GOODNESS.
At my last Airbnb, I had to strip the beds, wash every dish, clean the kitchen, haul the trash to the curb, and still faced a $100 cleaning fee. https://t.co/tfQGqQKsRo
— Jessica Huseman (@JessicaHuseman) October 20, 2026
• A separate case in Texas challenges the use of Flock cameras to secure convictions. Charles Brownlee, sentenced to 60 years for armed robbery, asks a federal appeals court to overturn his conviction, arguing that the AI-driven camera system grants law enforcement more surveillance power than the Constitution allows, according to The Texas Tribune.
• A California law taking effect in 2027 will require large corporations to make a good-faith effort to connect customers to a human representative by phone within 15 minutes, notes The San Francisco Standard. The law includes an exception for companies that never offered phone support in the first place, and it remains to be seen whether it will influence the AI firms pursuing the replacement of human agents.
• Jacob Sullum examines a complex lawsuit filed against Students for Life by a Texas woman who opposes a Texas anti-abortion statute.
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